Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings From the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946 by James P. Leary (review)

The global influence of American roots music never ceases to amaze, from Scandinavian neo-hillbilly tunes to country gospel by Indigenous Australians. In our zeal to enjoy this transcultural cross-fertilization, however, we often forget the history of farsighted documentarians who first struggled to bring American traditional music to wider public attention amidst intense cultural politics of the day—notably resistance to a pluralistic ideal—that sought to erase the ethnic difference evinced in such traditions. As a consequence, much of the musical wealth that early fieldworkers discovered remained buried in federal archives.

Jim Leary, one of the most respected scholars of folk music, has completed a project that acknowledges this legacy, specifically in the ethnic and linguistic mosaic of the mid-twentieth century Upper Midwest. Through incremental research spanning three decades, the author has painstakingly assembled a collection of audio and visual documents from the Library of Congress and provided an authoritative narrative that stitches together the intensive periods of fieldwork through which government-funded folklorists recorded information about singers, songs, and the communities from which they originated. Leary’s goal is to remind us of the depth and breadth of the region’s folk song traditions, but more importantly improve upon past publications that not only censored texts but also “emphasized English-language performances exclusively—as if the majority of the songs they recorded simply did not exist” (3). The result is a linguistically inclusive “redemptive countercultural project … that effectively challenges and considerably broadens our understanding of folk music in American culture” (4). In short, Leary has produced a multimedia presentation of tremendous scholarly and pedagogical value, one which thoroughly immerses us in the sounds and sights of a distinctive and diverse landscape of the past.

The author provides biographical portraits of three regionally significant “songcatchers”—Sydney Robertson, Helene Stratman-Thomas, and the young Alan Lomax—with insights to the gendered, financial, and professional challenges faced by each. The majority of the book’s chapters, though, serve as extensive “liner notes” for the five CDs and single DVD included with the volume; the CDs are arranged according to collector, while the DVD, “Alan Lomax Goes North,” features silent footage of performers, accompanied by field recordings of songs and readings from Lomax’s field notes. The reader as listener and viewer has access to a total of 187 representative selections distilled from roughly two-thousand field recordings of Scandinavian, Eastern European, Scot, Irish, Polish, German, Italian, French Canadian, African American, and Native American performers, along with songs from lumberjacks, the region’s dominant and ethnically diverse labor force. A range of musical genres allow us to feel the emotional contours of everyday experiences—the celebrations and sorrows, humor and drama of courting songs, bawdy worker ballads, polkas, lullabies, laments, dance tunes, and songs that reflected on joy and loss in adapting to a new country. Most examples are neatly annotated, and include unexpurgated transcriptions and translations for the more than twenty-five non-English languages. Historical photographs further enhance the volume’s aural and visual presentation.

There is little critical analysis here as to what precisely this music accomplished, and the reader will have to inspect the bibliography for studies of folk songs and their relationship to ethnic identity, social critique, and memory work. But the descriptive elements alone are worth the price of purchase. No other American book provides as rich a portrait of a distinct multilingual songscape than this one. And few other volumes are as illustrative of the historical fieldwork process—of the physical commitment required to document these “sonic fragments” from rural communities, lugging around heavy disc-cutting machines, blank records, and imposing microphones. This volume is a magnificent achievement and tribute to the ethnic diversity that continues to shape American expressive culture, so welcome at a time when immigration and language issues persist in the news and political rhetoric. I trust...