“The Abstract Pathos of Song”: Carl Sandburg, John Lomax, and the Modernist Revival of Folksong

This essay examines the collaboration of poet Carl Sandburg and folklorist John Lomax, who formed a salon in Chicago from 1917 to 1920 for the performance, exchange, and study of American folksongs. Sandburg and Lomax helped to introduce a poetics of song into American literary modernism. Meanwhile, their folklore scholarship helped to revive and reinvent the concept of folksong as a category for addressing the tumultuous racial politics of the interwar period. In examining Sandburg’s recorded performances of African American folksongs from the 1920s, this essay posits a modernist poetics of song that should be understood as an indigenous art of the age of sound recording and reproduction. Treating the aural elements of poetry as acoustic rather than linguistic phenomena—as the stuff of wavelengths and frequencies rather than phonemes and sound shapes—this poetics of song also used phonography’s disembodiment of voice to cast racial and ethnic markers as audible signifiers that could be mixed and recombined in performance as the stuff of new composite identities. Sandburg’s poetics of song, the essay argues, challenged Lomax’s traditional view of folksong as the expression of homogenous communities and promoted instead an ethnic and cultural pluralism that was deeply informed by the labor struggles of black and white workers in interwar Chicago.