A "songster," I found out recently, is not just a singer of folk songs, like a troubadour or a balladeer, but a collector of songs. A. P. Carter, of the Carter Family, was a songster; he climbed up steep mountain pathways to take orders for farm seed and to collect melodies and lyrics from isolated residents way up in the hills. "Songster," over time, came to mean not only a singer and collector of songs, but also the collection of songs. These songbooks have a lot in common with hymnals, offering us the words and music for the verses and choruses, written out simply.
.jpg)
In the back of this 1966 library book, borrowed recently from our statewide borrowing network, there is very basic information for acoustic guitar and piano accompaniment. Someone who's taken a year of piano lessons or was once part of a high school club could use this oversize volume to organize an elementary school's student concert for Parents' Night. The Heritage Songster would also be handy for a volunteer tasked with putting together a community sing.
Or, someone could use it to do some blog posts with music videos in them. :)
This week I start our digital community sing, and the best part is that you can participate in your jammies, and whenever you want. I'll begin at the front of the book, where I've picked out a couple of my favorite songs, then found a video of someone singing each. Let's get going!
At Lowell Elementary School, I remember singing "Shenandoah" in the fourth-grade classroom, and thinking "Doesn't the music teacher know we are children?" At the age of eight, I recognized "Shenandoah"as a song of longing for the familiar and left-behind. It was much deeper than simple homesickness and it seemed to be to be something adults felt much more than we children did, having such short personal histories. Also, looking back now, I don't think kids from Indianapolis really understood missing a beautiful landscape, since we grew up under skies made yellowish-gray by factory smokestacks.
Many decades later, of course, I love "Shenandoah" and it matches feelings I've had about my experiences. Here's Rhiannon (lead vocalist for the jazz group Alive!) singing this haunting, familiar song.
"Shenandoah" is a true folk song, in the sense that it was composed and revised and added to and subtracted from by people whose names we don't know. Apparently it's been a favorite with sailors, but it probably came from French-Canadian fur traders. That's all we know. But "Aura Lee" has a defined history.
"Aura Lee" (originally "Aura Lea" was not written by Stephen Foster. as may of us have assumed, but instead has lyrics by W. W. Fosdick and music by George R. Poulton.
As has often happened with songs so old they are out of copyright, there are so many awful versions of "Aura Lee." People thought it was too simple and they added weird echoes and sound effects and synth zithers, and so on. And then after Ken Burns' Civil War" documentary, many artists tried for historical versions. Many of these mmight be authentic but they are also almost unbearable in terms of listening.
For this post I've chosen the late Glen Campbell as the vocalist for "Aura Lee," because I agree with the choice he made to let this simple, sincere song stand on its own without monkeying around with it.
If you know old pop hits at all, then when you hear the melody of "Aura Lee," in your head you will hear Elvis Presley singing "Love Me Tender." Here's Elvis on a1949 jukebox which drops and spins a 78 rpm record of "Love Me Tender." Bonus: we get to hear it through the jukebox speaker.
If you think Elvis did a number on "Aura Lee," check out what Allan Sherman did to it.
To close this blog post, I'll share a couple more scans (besides the front cover) of the library book I borrowed. Usually I like to hunt for bookplates of donated books or from college libraries, due date slips with lots of rubber-stamped dates, and so on.
This week I have only the back cover, with an added bar code label, and then some penciled evidence that a grown person who took Heritage Songster out in the past did not realize that WE DO NOT WRITE IN LIBRARY BOOKS because they are not our personal property. Sheesh.
.jpg)
Exhibit A:
Next week: More songs and people singing them!
Comments
Post a Comment