Conference Agenda

Song recitals and illustrated lectures played a vital role in promoting the idea that folksong in America encompassed multiple cultural traditions. Beginning in the 1890s, recital programs and public, illustrated lectures considered songs of Native Americans, African Americans, Creoles and Anglo-Americans. These presentations were a byproduct of rising American nationalism and the debates about what constituted both American “art” music and American folksong. Although these discussions were given impetus by the publicity surrounding Dvořák’s New World Symphony (1893), the subsequent recitals and lectures were also influenced by the success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the singers of the Hampton Institute, the evolving field of ethnography (and particularly the work of Alice Fletcher and Henry Krehbiel), and the Indianist movement. From 1905, Arthur Farwell’s position that American folksong also included cowboy, Spanish Californian, minstrel, and Appalachian songs was widely adopted, with singers such as W. Bentley Ball and members of women’s music clubs creating programs encompassing representative examples of all these genres.

Singers were particularly important in disseminating this pluralistic understanding of folksong to white audiences because during this era song recitals and illustrated lectures were near rampant and they were viewed as both educational and entertaining. Sponsored by women’s clubs, patriotic organizations, churches, and educational organizations such as Chautauqua, as well as children’s schools, these programs were given at venues in major cities and rural towns, with seating ranging from less than a hundred to over a thousand. While tickets to song recitals given by stars of opera were often $1.50-$2.00, tickets to many of these presentations were more accessible, often a $1 or less, and many were free. Studying these recitals, many of which now raise serious issues of authenticity and appropriation, expands our knowledge of urban and rural musical culture during the long 19^th century and reveals how early ethnographic research and arguments about the nature of American folksong were disseminated to audiences beyond the cultural elites and major concert halls.

Early American folklorists agreed: there were no folk songs from California. And how could there be? There were no people there who counted as “folk.” Romanticized and racialized notions of “the folk” as a pre-modern peasantry excluded Indigenous peoples and ignored the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the region. For California, this left only the invading gold miners of the 1850s and the dust bowl refugees of the 1930s, whose migrations only reaffirmed the common theory that American culture traveled from East to West. However, the efforts of pioneering folklorist Robert W. Gordon, founding director of the Archive of American Folk Song, reveals a more complicated picture. Benjamin Filene, Karl Hagstrom Miller, and Ross Cole have demonstrated how “the folk” and their music were constructed through racialized logics of segregation and appropriation; and Deborah Kodish in particular has explored how these racial biases manifested in Gordon’s work. But the question remains: how was California evacuated of its folk musical history?

I return to Gordon’s archival collections with renewed attention to how ideas about cultural movement and geography may have constrained folklorists’ theories about how an American folk musical culture was in the process of developing––and in particular, what role California was to play in the burgeoning folk culture of the US. Gordon’s early collecting efforts in the Bay Area yielded a repertoire of sea shanties that trace an entirely distinct musical geography, one that spanned the Pacific Ocean, rounded Cape Horn, and connected California directly to the American South. Meanwhile, his column in Adventure magazine, “Songs Old Men Have Sung” solicited submissions from across the United States which paint a radically different portrait of how California folk music emerged, pointing to military service and college campuses as transient cultural hubs for folk transmission. Alongside these examples, I trace an intellectual history of early twentieth-century American folk song scholarship to reconsider how musical geographies intersect with racial geographies and narratives of national history. Ultimately, this paper aims to prompt new questions about not only how folk songs travel, but how our stories about folk song may travel along.

Participatory musicians often cultivate practices of creating and collecting recordings. While the published field recordings of ethnographers and cultural documentarians stand in the public eye, field recordings made by participants themselves are greater in number and often more important to the participatory communities. Musicians’ motivations for making field recordings might be documentarian, pedagogical, or affective. They might employ sophisticated or simple equipment. They might methodically label and organize recordings or allow ephemeral archives to quickly disintegrate. The recordings might be made publicly available, shared only with friends, or kept for personal use. The resulting archives, distributed across vast networks of participatory musicians, are only partially accessible, yet we can learn about their structures and significances even if they remain inaudible.

This research investigates the field recording and archival practices of shape-note singers to support a general theory of distributed participatory sonic archives. Singers build and use public archives across Internet domains, using general media-hosting sites (e.g., Bandcamp, Internet Archive, YouTube) in combination with personal and regional websites (e.g., Southern Field Recordings, Philadelphia FaSoLa) to make recordings available to the community. Most field recordings, however, live on the recording devices, heritage media, and computers of individual participants, and are shared only within closed social networks via email and messaging apps. This presentation will take as its central case study the grassroots processes by which singers created and shared recordings for two recent shape-note tunebooks, The Shenandoah Harmony (2012) and The Valley Pocket Harmonist (2024). This collective effort was highly valued by singers, who rely on recordings to learn songs, recall participatory experiences, and access emotional memory. The archives associated with these tunebooks span the public and private. The contents themselves include glimpses of intimate domestic singing, while access to the archives is sometimes only available on a peer-to-peer basis.

This research combines close examination of publicly available sonic archives with over forty interviews concerning singers’ use of Internet resources and private archival habits. Findings are brought into conversation with scholarship documenting DIY archival practices in other musicking communities and questioning the nature of archives as repositories of memory and meaning.