Burt Feintuch is professor of folklore and English at the University of New Hampshire, where he also directs the Center for the Humanities. From 1991 through 1995 he edited the Journal of American Folklore.
If you could hear the music the authors describe in this section on American musical traditions rooted in the British Isles, what would it sound like? To begin with the obvious, were it vocal music, it would be performed in English. Other languages from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have had varying degrees of currency in the United States, but they are almost entirely gone from the music cultures and musical genres discussed here. And because English is the nation's dominant language, it transcends sets of genres and varieties of performance sharing particular historical derivations. So, we have to go beyond language to think about what unites these musics.
That brings us to voice. Regardless of whether this music is sung or played on instruments, a quality that we might term "single-voicedness" characterizes it. The voice—human or instrumental—seems to be the focus, the strongest presence, in these musical traditions. In genres such as ballads, where the story is the heart of the performance, a single voice narrates. The voice is animated by melody, but the text is the thing, and the singer serves to give voice to that text. When groups sing in these traditions, they are predisposed to sing as one voice. Think of the precision of tight bluegrass harmonies, the dignity of Shaker hymns. The melodies tend to be regular, metrical. Counter-melodies are rare, and unison singing is common. Even, as in the example of the Old Regular Baptists lining out hymns, where the performance dynamic includes a songleader, the tendency is for the group to join in with the leader as soon as they recognize the line and to sing together. As a result, the sound, while ragged at the ends, melismatic (when several distinct tones—usually three or more—are used to carry a single syllable), and tolerant of a certain amount of individual interpretation, adds up to something pretty close to one voice.
Or think of the sound of a string band—fiddles, banjos, guitars, and other instruments
blazing away at dance music. The aesthetic there, it seems, is still a single-voiced one, where melody is what matters, even if the individual instruments take their own routes through the tune, some playing a version of the melody line, others providing rhythmic support for the melody. Most Irish instrumental music in the United States is based on this pattern as well. There, it's the tune that matters. Instruments in a session or accompanying dance may have a variety of roles and capabilities, but they hang together, and the tune is the thing. The closer we get to musical forms that most clearly reflect the influences of other musics or formal composers—Western swing, say, with its intimation of jazz timing, or the part-singing of some shape-note hymnody—the less pronounced the single-voicedness of the music is. But if it's music rooted in the British Isles, voice, story or text, and melody are likely to dominate in performances, whether secular or sacred, song or tune.
The musical traditions in this volume form the root of one of the oldest European musical cultures in the new world, the result of colonization by various populations from the British Isles. Over time, the music rooted in the British Isles began creative interactions with other musical traditions in the cultural mosaic that became the United States. As a result, although we use "British Isles" to categorize this volume's music, readers should understand that cultural interactions among many groups molded these musics in style and genre. At the start of the twenty-first century it is difficult to argue for a "pure stream" of British Isles music in the United States, but the musical traditions we label that way include genres and styles that many Americans continue to identify as quintessential examples of U.S. vernacular music.
Although the historical record is sketchy, it is safe to say that in their earliest embodiments the British Isles traditions in the new world were not significantly different from what the colonists had known at home. Over time, thanks to new cultural circumstances, the older music tended to develop its own distinctively American forms and styles of performance. In some cases, it localized and remained vital in certain places only, as in the example of some forms of hymnody. It developed regional styles and repertoires, as any survey of U.S. fiddle music would demonstrate. In other cases it inspired or blended with other forms of musical creativity en route to the creation of new styles and genres. As twentieth-century musical innovations, bluegrass and Western swing exemplify that trend of innovation. But some of the old forms lost their vitality and exist today only in very marginal circumstances or as revived or preserved traditions. That is largely the case of the ballad, the narrative song that is one of the oldest forms of European music in the new world. All of the musical traditions in this volume thrived well into the twentieth century, though, and at the start of the twenty-first, many of them are still thriving if not always strongly represented in mass culture.
It is tempting to think of all of the British Isles music as early arrivals in North America. But some of the musical traditions in this volume came with more recent waves of immigrants. The Irish music that thrives in some U.S. cities is largely a twentieth-century development here, thanks to patterns of transatlantic immigration, and in some places, such as Boston and New York, its vitality is bound up with the continuing fact of immigration. Cape Bretoners in the Boston area play the Scottish-influenced music of their homeland, having gone to the "Boston states" out of economic necessity. Immigrant communities, no matter what their background, frequently use music as an important way to maintain social ties and to represent identity, and while many Americans stereotypically associate British Isles traditions with a long-vanished colonial English majority culture, some of the musical traditions this volume presents thrive in contemporary communities of immigrants.
Now complicate matters more by factoring in both the mass media and cultural diversity. Even the oldest of the musical traditions in this section exist, or existed, thanks in part to print. For example, the ballad, a genre deeply rooted in western European oral tradition, is inextricably tangled up with printed broadsheets, both in Britain and the United States, where printers routinely published and sold song texts on broadsides into the early twentieth century. But the advent of inexpensive means of packaging and reproducing music—popular-culture phenomena such as minstrel shows and sheet music at first, but particularly sound recordings and radio in more recent years—had the dual effect of spreading many sorts of music beyond their localities and inspiring much cultural creativity. Beyond Native American traditions, one could argue that culture contact, especially, but not solely, between European and African Americans, gave us all distinctively American musical forms and that the mass media supercharged cultural exchange, accelerating it and raising the economic stakes.
Nearly all of this music was local at first, even if it was familiar in many different localities. Ballad singing, now nearly gone, was part of domestic life, a way to connect people and social values in the contexts of work and play. Based on English and Scottish templates, this form flourished in the United States, and a distinctive body of narrative folk songs developed in various American regions. Play-parties and dances were based in local communities, often part of household life, as in New England kitchen rackets.
Reflecting social change, over time many of these secular music traditions, especially dancing, moved from the home to more public events such as community picnics, frolics, and other local gatherings held at grange halls and schoolhouses. These domestic and community musical events provided some of the most important opportunities for musical exchanges between African American and white musicians, especially before the Civil War, when black musicians often entertained whites, especially by playing for dancing, at corn shuckings, balls, and other events. Although much American country dance was originally based on English and French patterns, it went on to assume regional forms in the United States, and in some places dance style and the music that accompanies it are both inflected by African American aesthetics and performance styles.
The commercialization of entertainment also furthered cultural exchange, even if from today's vantage point the entertainment itself seems permeated by racism. Black-face minstrelsy probably introduced the banjo to white musicians, where it became, for a brief time, a voguish instrument in genteel circles before developing its current association with oldtime and bluegrass musics. Industrial and entrepreneurial developments transformed the banjo from a homemade, often rudimentary, instrument to a technically advanced, and sometimes highly adorned, musical instrument. These developments, coupled with the advent of mass merchandising, also led to the invention of the auto-harp, the integration of the mandolin into string band music, the popularization of the guitar, and other new developments. Entrepreneurship created new commercial ventures such as public dances, which also fostered cultural exchange.
The early recording industry had a huge impact on the British Isles traditions. On one hand, early commercial recordings documented vernacular styles of music from various American regions. Some early recordings seem to have captured repertoires and performance styles that were direct reflections of an older British Isles set of traditions. On the other hand, the emergence of the recording industry encouraged new musical creativity, leading to twentieth-century popular forms based on the stylistic and generic conventions of older musical forms. Bluegrass is a case in point. Based on older string band music, with a strong dose of upland Southern religious singing traditions, it also shows a strong African American influence, especially rhythmically. Bill Monroe, who invented bluegrass, credited the influence of a Black guitar player from western Kentucky, Arnold Schultz. For a time, bluegrass was a regional popular music, very much commercialized in its performance settings and in its connection to radio and the recording industry. Over time, it transcended much of its regional base, and today it has an international following. Western swing is a parallel example, incorporating older fiddle music styles with the swing music of its day, and reflecting the complicated cultural mix of its southwestern birthplace, where German American, Mexican American, and African American musicians (not to mention many others) influenced the creation of a number of regional popular musics. As the social base of much American music moved away from intimate local settings, new forms of commercially viable music—rockabilly and honky-tonk, for instance—built on the foundations of those community-based musics, playing a major role in the emergence of dominant forms of American popular music.
The availability of recording technology also gave impetus to the work of scholars and enthusiasts interested in documenting musical traditions. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, local enthusiasts, scholars, and others were publishing the results of songhunting field research. Early on, the ballad was a powerful draw, and many published collections feature ballads discovered in field research, typically in either the southeast or in New England. Sound recording technology allowed fieldworkers to document musical sounds and performances. Archival collections such as the Archive of Folk Song, established in 1928 at the Library of Congress (now the Archive of Folk Culture), developed as major repositories of sound recordings of a wide range of musical traditions.
Fieldworkers documented many examples of music rooted in the British Isles—remarkable fiddle players as well as occupational songs from loggers, cowboys, and miners, for example—as Americans came to understand that many of these musical traditions were vital in various communities. Some regional musics grew to be emblematic, featured at events such as early folk festivals, which often celebrated (and frequently manipulated) regional identities. The various waves of folk music revivals in the twentieth century often privileged British Isles traditions, as young, middle-class enthusiasts embraced mining songs from Kentucky, bluegrass music, shape-note hymnody, and other vernacular musical forms. Today, the immense popularity of various"Celtic" musics, especially Irish music, comes in part from revivalist efforts in U.S. Irish communities, and Irish American communities and musicians are often connected to a transnational set of performers, recording companies, and venues.
In many cases, the musical traditions here reflect very significant cultural change. What was once the music of intimate community life is now often the music of enthusiasts from no particular community. The New England social dances that Nicholas Hawes writes about in this volume are now typically removed from locality. Dance enthusiasts travel from many places to dance together, and they often speak of a "dance community" rooted not in one locality but instead constituted at the dance events. Dancers may still use grange halls and other local venues, and they often valorize the dances as an old New England tradition, but they represent a very different demographic from the people who used to hold kitchen rackets.
Many of the musical traditions have moved away from their earlier functions. Oldtime fiddling is primarily a music for concerts, festivals, and jam sessions these days, having moved away (although not entirely) from its association with dance. The same is at least generally true of Irish music in the United States, although the very end of the twentieth century saw the development of widespread interest in Irish step dance. There are probably more revivalist shape-note singers than religious congregations that sing the old shape-note hymns. Bluegrass music has a panethnic, international following; Western swing is more a concert music than a dance music. People organize themselves around some of these musical forms, forming oldtime fiddlers associations, bluegrass trade organizations, or shape-note singing groups; creating festivals; circulating homemade and locally produced recordings; and publishing newsletters. Although in many cases their local environments have shifted, it is striking that so many of the U.S. musical traditions rooted in the British Isles have flourished so long, proving themselves adaptable to dramatic changes in community, entertainment, and notions of art in American society.
