Biographies of Informants and some Collectors L-M
Biographies of Informants, Performers and some Collectors (Traditional Ballads and Folk Songs)
North America (Arranged in Alphabetical order by last name)
[This section is for biographies of the important informants of Anglo-Saxon ballads and folk songs and is not all inclusive. Every collector had their best informants. Some informants by their reputations were visited by many collectors, and recordings were made in some instances. Some informants were recording artists in the 1920s and their songs were collected indirectly by the record companies.
The focus of this study is North America. At some point The British Isles will be included on a separate page.
There is little known about some collectors, for example, Fred High (MO-AR), John Stone (VA, under the auspices of the Virginia Folklore Society), Winston Wilkinson (VA, under the auspices of the Virginia Folklore Society).
R. Matteson 2015]
Informants and Some Collectors- North America
CONTENTS
Lomax, Alan 1915-2002 collector, recorder, author, performer
Lomax, John A. (MS-TX) 1867 collector cowboys songs, American songs, father of Alan. Recordings
Macon, Uncle Dave (TN) 1870- 1952 Recordings
Martin, Asa (KY) 1900- 1979
McAllister, Mary Bird (VA) Brown's Cove (See george foss)
McAtee, Nancy (WV) Folk Songs of the South
McCarn, Dave (NC) 1905- 1964
McClintock, Harry (TN-CA) 1882- 1957
McDonald, Grant (MO) Thesis A Study of Selected Folk Songs from Southern Missouri.
Merrill, Orlon (NH) Barry Flanders
Moses, Johnathon (NH) informant Flanders
Musick, Ruth Ann (WV)
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An Index to the Field Recordings in the Flanders Ballad Collection
at Middlebury College; Middlebury, Vermont.
Elmer Barton, who contributed many fiddle tunes and songs to the archive, sent Flanders to his cousin, Jonathan Moses, in Orford, New Hampshire. Moses recorded altogether over 100 songs between 1939 and 1951.
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An Index to the Field Recordings in the Flanders Ballad Collection at Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont
Flanders' collecting efforts in Vermont and New Hampshire were aided by Philips Barry, who provided small lists of names of singers from whom he had collected during his own travels in the region earlier in the century. Among
these singers was Orlon Merrill, who was highly regarded by Barry. Between
February 1931 and September 1932, Flanders recorded Mr. Merrill in Charlestown,
New Hampshire, singing well-known British and American ballads, including
twenty-five verses of the American ballad, "Margaret Grey".
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Voice from past sang of a social time in history
Sunday, September 19, 2010.
by David Maurer The Daily Progress
It’s often the most undeserving people who are remembered by history.
Positive contributors to life’s story, such as Mary Bird McAllister, frequently become little more than a faded name on the ancestral-tree page of an old family Bible. And yet this particular mountain woman, who lived much of her life in Brown’s Cove, gave the world a gift money couldn’t buy.
Deep within the recesses of the Library of Congress, embedded on magnetic tape, is the singing voice of Mrs. McAllister. She can be heard singing more than 50 folk ballads, many of which originated in the Scottish highlands centuries ago and were brought here by the first Virginia settlers.
In the late 1950s, folksinger Paul Worthington, who recorded under the name Paul Clayton, had recorded her voice for posterity singing the ancient ballads. Having traveled throughout Europe collecting traditional ballads and folksongs, he realized the importance of retaining the old songs Mrs. McAllister knew.
At the time of the recordings the mother of eight had lived a long life. She was born in Brown’s Cove on April 8, 1877, the daughter of Larkin Bruce.
When she was 10, she started plucking the strings on her brother Grant’s banjo. She liked it so much that she decided to make one of her own.
The ingenious little girl got hold of a wooden hoop and then secured a thick piece of cardboard to it to create the banjo’s head. A brother carved a neck and tuning pegs for it out of wood and fastened it to the body.
In an interview Mrs. McAllister gave The Daily Progress in the summer of 1957, she said she waxed strands of cotton and used them for strings. After tuning up, she was ready to go.
During the interview, the self-taught banjo player said she could play her homemade instrument as well as her brother’s “store-boughten” one.
As the front-porch chat with the reporter went on, she remembered a time when apple butter “stewings” or “corn shuckings” were community events. After the fires went out beneath the big kettles, or the last yellow ears of corn had been shucked, the musical instruments would come out.
Then, late into the night, square dancers would swirl to the music of banjos, fiddles and guitars. It was at these social get-togethers that Mrs. McAllister learned the words and music to the old songs.
The wife of Lem McAllister probably didn’t see herself as a repository of historically important material. She was simply a woman who had once enjoyed a chew of tobacco and an occasional nip of locally brewed moonshine.
She had acquired the tobacco habit by way of her father. As a youngster she would accompany him into the mountains to pick huckleberries.
When she got thirsty, he would give her a small piece of chewing tobacco to wet up her mouth. It wasn’t long before she started “borrowing” a chew from dad or a brother just to enjoy the tasting and spitting for its own sake.
Mrs. McAllister said the “chewing and nipping” ended when she joined the Pentecostal Church. She never did give up the music.
A few months after her 80th birthday, she and Worthington supplied the music during a “finger dinner” at the historic Headquarters house in Brown’s Cove. One onlooker remarked how nimble her fingers still were as she played and sang.
Of course, the inevitable day came when word moved from ridge to hollow that the balladeer with the low and lovely voice was gone. Sadly, life teaches that the tracks left by the hard stomp of a tyrant’s boots are not as easily eroded by time as the gently placed footsteps of a Mary Bird McAllister.
But with the help of a young folksinger, this woman of the mountains held back the darkness cast by a forgetful world and preserved a ray of history.
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Folksingers and the Re-Creation of Folksong Author(s): John Quincy Wolf Source: Western Folklore,Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), pp. 101-111
Neal Morris, of Mountain View, Arkansas, father of Jimmie Driftwood, was born into a home in which parents and grandparents all were singers. It is, therefore, not surprising that he knows about a hundred and twenty- five folksongs, which he sings to his guitar, and that he has for fifty-five of his seventy-six years been known as one of the best singers of Stone County and surrounding area. His neighbors are fond of saying that he can outsing his son Jimmie. When I asked him the direct question about folksingers editing their songs, he answered as though he had given some thought to the question-
as undoubtedly he had. "No," he said, "a singer doesn't deliberately change his songs. He may forget a word here and there and put in other words, but if he remembers a song as his parents sang it, he will not change it." That Mr. Morris was making an accurate statement about his own practice is shown by some of my recordings of his songs. For example, when I was transcribing from my tape the words of the "Nightingale Song," I heard what sounded like this: "Play 'the old concorfit' and I'll make the violin ring." The unusual phrase occurs twice. I wrote an inquiry about it to him and re- ceived no reply. A few months later I paid him one of my frequent visits. "Yes," he said, "you heard it right, but I'm not certain about the word or what it means. 'The old concorfit' could be the name of the piece he played." In another song I was uncertain about a word, which he told me was "sugged." He was not sure what it meant, but he had not seen fit to substi- tute. When a singer is so faithful to tradition that he retains unique words or phrases that have uncertain meanings, we may conclude that he has some basis for believing that folksingers do not deliberately change the words of the songs handed down to them. But the matter does not end there. Mr. Morris said: Certainly, singers do change songs. Changes can't be avoided because of the very nature of folklore and the way the songs are passed along. You let a man teach his four children a song. When he is gone and the children have been separated for a while, there'll be four versions of the song, even though they try to sing it just like their father-unless, of course, the five sang the songs together a lot. Even then, time will bring changes. As for me, I change my songs as little as anybody. When I was younger I had a typographical memory, and I have always tried to sing the songs as I heard them. Now here is another angle: In the old days, a folksinger respected the other singers of his community and did not borrow or steal their songs. If he sang them at all, he did so when he was by himself. (There is a considerable amount of evidence that this custom was not peculiar to Mr. Morris's community. For example, C. C. McKown, writing in the New York Times from Glenville, West Virginia, June 30, 1957, reported that the villagers would not sing "A Few More Months" for a visitor, but directed him to Frank Kennedy. " 'It's Uncle Frank's song,' they said.") But if a singer left the neighborhood, said Mr. Morris, those who knew his songs would try to sing them. The situation was somewhat different if a stranger came into the community. He might sing a song that was new to the people, and they wouldn't sing it as long as the stranger was around. But they would try to remem- ber it, and when he left, one or more singers would try to put it together, but they might have to do some patchwork, so the song would be changed up, maybe a
good deal. And different versions of the same song would go along side by side in the same neighborhood. Mr. Morris allows himself greater liberties with the melody than with the words. In the tape recordings of his songs which I have made through a period of several years, I notice a number of minor variations in melody, and I incline to think that he is likely to vary the musical phrases in some of his songs almost every time he sings them.