Bullfrog Jumped: Children's Folksongs from the Byron Arnold Collection (review)

A P R I L 2 0 0 9 149 Bullfrog Jumped: Children’s Folksongs from the Byron Arnold Collection. Produced by Joyce Cauthen. Montgomery: Alabama Folklife Association, 2006. $17.00. Audio CD. Bullfrog Jumped is a beautiful presentation of children’s folksongs culled from the Byron Arnold collection at the University of Alabama. Arnold, a professor of music at the university, spent three summers in the mid-1940s traveling throughout Alabama collecting folksongs. He feared that with the continued popularity and availability of radios and recorded music in the home, the practice of entertaining one’s self and family with traditional stories and songs would fade away and that many would be lost for good. It is ironic that technology enables us to preserve material on the one hand while replacing and sometimes erasing collective knowledge on the other. This digital recording makes available important archival material in a twenty-first-century format. Although Arnold collected more than six hundred ballads, spirituals, work songs, games, and children’s songs, only a portion were presented in his 1950 book, Folksongs of Alabama. Byron planned for other songbooks but they were never completed. Bullfrog Jumped focuses on children’s songs and games he mostly recorded in the summer of 1947. The singers whose voices have been captured here are a diverse group of Alabama women. Among the sixteen is Vera Hall, who was born in Sumter County in 1902 and whose voice was used in a recording by techno-musician Moby on his best-selling album Play. Another is Julia Greer Marechal, the matriarch of a large family, who was ninety-four when Arnold arrived to record her songs. Martha Drisdale was the granddaughter of Alabama governor Robert Burns Lindsay and founder of the first free kindergarten in Alabama. Mozella Hazley Longmire was seventeen and known at Mt. Triumph Baptist Church for her voice. Mary Chapman, a babysitter from Grove Hill, appears only once on the CD but with her own special version of “All the Pretty Little Horses,” which she called “Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy.” One of the most unique qualities of Bullfrog Jumped is this combination of the voices of rich and poor, black and white, connected through their love of singing old songs. The overall design of the CD is enticing and informative. The use of original art by Bethanne Hill on the cover makes the listener want to pick up the CD and play it even if he or she is not interested in children’s folksongs. The CD booklet reads like a miniature history book with lyrics , biographies, references, and footnotes on how to play the children’s games. It would be nice if all CDs had this information. Bullfrog Jumped also has a Web site, http://www.alabamafolklife.org/bullfrogjumped.html, T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 150 which offers the history of the songs, the story of Byron Arnold, and a detailed “learning guide” for use in classrooms. The guide explores introducing folklore to children through the songs and games on the CD, and includes activities and lesson plans for children in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. Bullfrog Jumped is an excellent resource for musicologists, teachers, and singers—all those “folk” who are still in the business of passing down and preserving our collective past. It would be interesting to see how children respond to this CD. They might have some difficulty in understanding the words, and some of the tunes appear fragmented. A companion recording of modern renditions of these songs would truly make accessible to the current generation not only the music but perhaps a greater understanding of their own history. KATE CAMPBELL Nashville, Tennessee Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War. Edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Barton C. Shaw. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. x, 315 pp. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-8130-3067-8. Making A New South is a book that will be useful to teachers, scholars, laypersons, and all those interested in the evolution of the idea of a “New South.” Its essays, collected by noted historians of the South...