iS 
Land Sc Water 
February 28, 191 8 
Life and Letters ^ J. C Squire 
A Comer of Old England 
IT has been maintained that War is indispensable because 
it teaches people geography. I will not discuss the 
merits or the defects of that" doctrine here, and I freely 
admit that in August, 1914, I knew nothing of the 
situation of Prest-Litovsk or Bourlon Wood. But the 
illumination of war is only local, and, since I have to mention 
the Southern Appalachians, I had better explain what they 
are. They are a range of mountains or, rather, an extensive 
mountain district running from the Pennyslvania border, 
through the Virginias, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and Tennessee 
into the northern p;irts of Georgia and Alabama. Here Mrs. 
O. D. Campbell and Mr. Cecil Sharp (to whom we owe the 
recovery of many of our old countrj^ songs) have been hunting 
for English Folk Songs. The results of their explorations are 
published at 12.9. 6d. net by Messrs. Putnam ; the book is a 
romance. 
t * * * * * 
The Southern .Appalachian region is a large one, larger than 
Great Britiiin. Mr. Sharp has, therefore, covered as yet no 
more than small portions of it, chiefly in the " Laurel Country " 
of North Carolina. In that region he had experiences which, 
to an imaginative man, must have been as thrilling as any- 
thing that has ever happened to an explorer in Central Africa 
or Borneo. It is mountainous, thickly wooded, and very 
secluded. There are few roads, except mountain tracks ; 
and scarcely any railroads. " Indeed, so remote and shut off 
from outside influence were, until quite recently, these seques- 
tered mountain valleys that the inhabitants have for a hundred 
years or more been completely isolated and cut ofi from all 
traffic with the rest of the world." !> suppose this is a slight 
e.xaggeration : that, for instance, these Arcadians, however 
fortunately sequestered, imported doctors, clothes, and tools. 
But one knows what Mr. Sharp means. Coming into their midst 
the travellers found themselves in a " pocket " of an old 
England which has disappeared. They found a strong, 
spare race ; leisurely ; easy and unaffected in their bearing, 
and with " the unselfconscious manners of the well-bred." 
They are mostly illiterate, and each family grows just what 
is needed to support life ; but they are contented, quick- 
witted and, in the truest sense, civilised. Their ancestors 
came, apparently, from the north of England ; their religion 
is Calvinistic. Generations of freedom in America has un- 
doubtedly modified some of their original characteristics. 
They drink and smoke very little and " commercial com- 
petition and social rivalries are unknown." But though in 
some regards they have customs peculiar to themselves, in 
others they are more faithful transmitters of old English 
tradition than are the English of to-day: 
Their speech is English, not American, and, from the number 
of expressions they use which have long been obsolete else- 
where and the old-fashioned way in which they pronounce 
• many of their words, it is clear that they are talking the 
language of a past day, though exactly of what period I am 
not competent to decide. 
****** 
In that antique tongue they sing the old songs that their 
ancestors brought over from England in the time of George III 
and perhaps still eariier. Here in England the folk-song 
collector always has to make straight for the Oldest In- 
habitant. The young know few of the old songs, being supplied 
with music-hall songs from London and Berlin and rag-times 
from New York. In the Appalachians, where cosmopolitan 
music IS unknown, the folk-song tradition is as strong in the 
young as in the aged, and Mr. Sharp has, on occasion, drawn 
what he wanted from small boys. There, in log-huts and 
farmsteads, hundreds of miles west of the Atlantic coast on 
uplands lying between Philadelphia and St. Louis, he found 
this people strayed from the eighteenth century, using such 
phrases as " But surely you will tarry with us for the night " 
and singing, with a total unconsciousness both of themselves 
and of their auditors, of woods and bowers, milk white steeds 
and dapple greys, lily-white hands, silver cups, the Northern 
Sea, London Bridge, and the gallows. He heard from these 
mountain singers The Golden Vanity. The Cherry Tree Carol 
Lord Randal. The Wife of Usher's Well, Lady Isabel and the 
tlf Kntght. and scores of less well known ballads and songs 
versions of which the collectors have .for years been painfully 
picking up in Sussex, Somersetshire, Yorkshire and Cornwall 
It IS a strange reflection that, had we left it a little later we 
might have had to go to America for old folk music which 
had been totally lost on English soil. 
Mr. Sharp does not inake it quite clear which of his songs 
are hitherto altogether unrecorded ; he includes several 
ballads nat in Child's collection, but Child may have deliberately 
rejected them and they may have appeared elsewhere. Re- 
markably, he got no ritual songs, songs associated with 
harvest home, morris and sword dances, or the coming of 
English spring and the primroses. His hundred and twenty- < 
two texts include only one carol and few songs touching on 
religion. The English rituals were not transplanted ; the 
festivals died out ; the doctrines of the mountaineers depre- 
cated dancing ; and the spring of their new country was not 
the spring of their old. They are strongest in ballads, and in 
songs (like Shooting of His Dear) with stories in them, whicii 
things lose nothing by transplantation across a hemisphere : 
and the songs are still living in the old way, growing and 
changing with the whims and memories of individual singers, 
yet always retaining the essential kernel. Nearly all the 
tunes are in " gapped scales," scales with only five or six notes 
to the octave ; as always with folk song they are predominantly 
melancholy, and many of them are e.xcecdingly beautiful. 
****** 
That Mr. Sharp's te.xts— or indeed those of folk songs as a 
whole— are in the bulk great poetry I will not maintain. 
.At Its least polished the folk song sinks to the level of thi< 
(sung by Mrs. Tom Rice, at Big Laurel, West Carolina) : 
They hadn't been laying in bed but one hour 
When he hearfl the trumpet sAund. 
She cried out with a thrilling cry : 
O Lord, O Lord, I'm ruined. 
This, possibly, is a corruption of something originally a little 
more rounded ; a process similar to that which works upon all 
folk songs and which (in the Appalachian versions of The 
Golden Vanity) gives the name of that good ship variously as 
the Weeping Willow Tree and the Golden Willow Tree and 
provides a sister ship with the names of Golden Silveree and 
Turkey Silveree, which might strike even an Appalachian 
as an odd name for a vessel. We do not know in folk songs. 
as a rule, what is " original " and what is not ; usually there 
has been so much accretion that there can hardly be said to 
be an " original " at all. The process is not productive of 
great verse, comparable with the masterpieces of form pro- 
duced by poets with surnames, fountain pens and identifiable 
tomb-stones, though often there is a poignancy about in- 
dividual lines and stanzas which makes them very effective 
even when divorced from their exquisite tunes, which are the 
real tnumphs of folk-production. Mr. Sharp's American 
CO lection is certainly not, textually, superior to the English 
collections. But it does contain some fine things. It must 
have been queer to listen to The True Lover's Farewell 
commg from the lips of a woman in the American backwoods : 
O fare you well my own true love. 
So fare you well for a while, 
I'm going away, but I'm coming back 
If I go ten thousand mile. 
If I prove false to you, my love. 
The earth may melt and burn. 
The sea may freeze and the earth may burn 
if I no more return. 
Ten thousand miles, my < wn true love. 
Ten thousand miles or more ; 
Thfe rocks may melt and the sea may burn 
■ If I never no more return. 
And who will shoe your pretty little feet. 
Or who will glove your hand, 
Or who will kiss your red rosy cheek 
When I'm in the foreign land ? 
My father will shoe my pretty little feet. 
My mother will glove my hand, 
And you can kiss my red rosy cheek 
When you return again. 
O don't you see yon little turtle dove, 
A-skipping from vine to vine 
A-mourning the loss of its own true love ' 
Just as I mourn for mine ? 
Don't you see yon pretty girl 
A-spinning on yonder wheel ? 
Ten thousand gay, gold guineas would I give 
To feel just like she feels. 
I^ L?f'' f^^^r'^ i""^" ^'^^ ^ j^""!^ ; but the construction 
iL^f.V.f J ??^^'"P ^^ pursuing his researches now in 
Kentucky ; and his occupation is enviable. 
