Vermont folk-song collecting: 'It became her identity'
Written by Susan Green
Radio was the enemy for a songcatcher who began traveling the backroads of Vermont in 1930, when the state had almost nothing but backroads.
Helen Hartness Flanders was concerned that, as rural electrification spread across the land, people were likely to eschew an oral tradition she cherished. The Springfield native’s mission: To make field recordings of the ancient ballads that salt-of-the-earth folks still warbled in their parlors and on their front porches.
Commercial broadcasting, only a decade old, meant that homespun entertainment probably was destined to become obsolete. It would be eclipsed by popular melodies of the day — Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher,” for example — emanating over the airwaves from the contraption with vacuum tubes.
Flanders hauled around another contraption, the Model 12 Edison Dictaphone Machine, to capture ballads that could be traced back to earlier centuries and other continents. “Folk-song collecting is like a continued story of which you do not know the beginning,” she once observed. “You drop into a situation or experience that has been going on without you.”
From a well-to-do family and married to U.S. Sen. Ralph Flanders, this was a woman who forged a career of dropping in on ordinary people, some living in ramshackle country homes. Her friend and colleague, author Dorothy Canfield Fisher, was recruited for the committee but at first doubted Vermonters would be able to offer many songs.
'Come-all-ye's and chanties'
Flanders suspected otherwise and persevered. An already dirt-poor Vermont was reeling from the Great Depression but could boast a rich heritage. She persuaded farmers and mill workers and housewives and loggers, some of them immigrants and most elderly, to record songs they knew, as well as to explain how they’d come to know them.
The quest was jumpstarted by open letters that Flanders distributed to all Vermont newspapers in mid-June of 1930, asking for tips from the public. “There must be come-all-ye’s and chanties and French-Canadian dialect songs, nursery songs and altered Welsh, English and Scottish ballads,” she wrote.
The idea was to preserve grassroots music, soon publishing songbooks for that purpose, before it could be forsaken and forgotten. In the process, she also documented a disappearing way of life.
On of the most prolific singers Flanders discovered was Myra Daniels, an East Calais resident who — along with her brother, Elmer George of North Montpelier — contributed about 90 tunes to the collection between 1935 and 1954. They had Old World titles like “Once More a-Lumbering Go” and “Three Pretty Lassies.”
Interviewed via the dictaphone, which Flanders often plugged into her automobile’s cigarette lighter if the home had no electricity, Daniels described a Woodbury man who had taught the siblings many vintage ballads: “He was a regular tramp,” she can be heard saying about Frank Layton. ”He went trampin’ around. He mighta learned them in some shanty.”
Flanders went trampin’ around Vermont in pursuit of songs for the better part of 28 years. And she continued the project with her own resources when the committee’s temporary funding ran out after nine months.
“They had tapped the right person,” said her great-niece, vocalist Deb Flanders of Burlington. “It was Helen’s obsession. She just couldn’t stop. In a line at the grocery store, she would ask a total strangers if they had songs.”
May would be a significant month for Helen Flanders; She was born on the 19th in 1890 and died on the 23rd in 1972. Four decades after her death, the fruit of her labors is evident in a massive collection at Middlebury College: some 4,500 recordings, mostly sung a cappella; 3,500 books and journals; 500 broadsides (printed texts of songs); a plethora of field notes and correspondence.
In addition, there’s a climate-controlled room for her 254 wax cylinders, the medium used by the Edison Dictaphone that she relied on from 1930 until 1939; 60 aluminum and acetate discs that became the preferred medium from 1940 until 1947; and reel-to-reel tapes that were her staple thereafter. The antique gizmos themselves also have been saved, relics of a simpler world.
'Quirkier stuff'
More accessible to the public, however, are cassette tapes of the songs that Flanders left behind. Recently, three members of the Vermont band Atlantic Crossing pored through the ballads at Middlebury’s Davis Family Library in search of new material for their folk repertoire.
“We began including her songs on our first CD in 1998,” said Viveka Fox, who plays fiddle and two types of drums, the bodhran and the djembe. “They’re so authentic. There are a lot about local tragedies, work and everyday life. We‘re more interested in those, rather than the ones about lords and ladies or fairies and demons. And we look for quirkier stuff that’s specific to New England”
For the group’s upcoming seventh album, the Flanders collection will again be essential, according to Fox, even though “it’s a bit of a scavenger hunt.”
Listeners have to repeatedly fast-forward and rewind to locate any particular selection on a cassette tape. No money is available to digitize the thousands of songs, all listed along with the performers in a 240-page index compiled in 1983 by Jennifer Post, then curator of the college’s special collections.
In 1941 everything Flanders had stored at her own house was donated to the college and originally kept in the school’s music library elsewhere on campus. “After she died in the 1970s, there was no one out there promoting the songs she spent so long collecting,” suggested Andrew Wentink, the current curator and a 1970 Middlebury graduate. “The Flanders Ballad Collection is something of an orphan here. Maybe it’s been seen as the holy of holies, not for the masses.”
He’d like to change that designation. “My personal goal as an historian is to focus on the value of this collection in American culture,” Wentink said. ”It’s about sharing the wealth. I’m from the use-it-or-lose-it school of thought.”
As a girl, Deb Flanders, whose paternal grandfather was Ralph Flanders’ brother, had been only vaguely aware of the musical endeavor that compelled her great aunt. She has since made up for lost time, performing many songs from the collection.
An entire Deb Flanders CD, “Mother Make My Bed” in 1997, is devoted to Helen’s treasure trove. Another album due out this summer — produced by Pete Sutherland, a versatile Monkton musician who has tirelessly promoted the ballad collection — will infuse the old folk tunes with some classical, jazz and blues flavors.
The tentative title is “The Female Highwayman,” taken from a song Helen Flanders attributed to Mrs. B.A. Chapman of Springfield in 1930. But that isn’t necessarily Deb Flanders’ favorite.
Her choice is “The House Carpenter,” which has no fewer than 13 versions in the collection, most of them from Vermonters. Pete Seeger Joan Baez and Bob Dylan have delivered other renditions of this ballad about a woman enticed by the charming Devil to leave her spouse and “wee babe.”
“I especially love the way Pete has interpreted the drama of the song for the new CD.” Flanders pointed out.
With happily-ever-after a rarity among folk chestnuts, “Carpenter” spins a yarn of doom: “What hills, what hills are those, my love/ that rise so fair and high?/ Those are the hills of heaven, my love/ but not for you and I.”
Folklore and eugenics
The green hills of Vermont were home to Helen Hartness Flanders, daughter of a former one-term governor who reportedly was the state’s first millionaire. A fledgling poet adept at playing piano, she seemed to possess another talent: organizing community orchestral events in Springfield.
After they married, her businessman-husband was elected to the U.S. Senate, serving from 1946 to 1959. In 1954 he had to courage introduce a motion to censure fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy for conducting a virulent anti-communist witch hunt.
Ralph Flanders also may have been ahead of his time in supporting a wife, and mother of their three children, whose work was as significant as his. He even recorded a little ditty, “We Will Go Round and Round,” for her collection.
That collection was sparked by a political initiative. The state’s Commission on Vermont Country Life spawned the Committee on Traditions and Ideals. Helen Flanders and 10 other Vermonters with artistic experience were recruited. She was asked to investigate music of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of it from the British Isles, that had been passed down through the generations.
The commission, however, had emerged from a controversial program to purify the population: the eugenics movement, which sought to expunge Vermont’s “Abenakis, Gypsies, Pirate and River Rats.” From 1925 through 1928, a state-wide survey attempted to list everyone with theoretical genetic defects, such as mental illness. At least 200 victims were actually sterilized in a sort of ethnic cleansing operation.
In her 1930 letter to newspapers, Flanders briefly mentions “eugenic” among several other words —religious, educational, economic, social and medical — to describe “Vermont’s present status” that the commission hoped to determine. But, perhaps she never grasped the implications since her own efforts did not appear to discriminate.
In fact, the wonderful cross-section of humanity — including Abenakis, Gypsies, Pirates and River Rats (low-income people who worked on inland waterways or lived near them) — is frequently the most dynamic subject for a song. In the Flanders collection, a plethora of titles attest to this fascination: “Gypsy Davey,” “Gypsy Daisy,” “Gypsy’s Hornpipe” and “Gypsy’s Warning,” among others.
The first line of a Celtic classic goes “A gypsy rover come over the hill/ Down through the valley so shady...” Think Bob Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues,” with lyrics like “Gypsy Davey with a blowtorch he burns out their camps/ With his faithful slave Pedro behind him he tramps....”
Flanders initially set out to collect the 305 English and Scottish ballads assembled by Sir Francis Child in the late 1800s that covered topics of romance, the supernatural, morality, riddles, murder and folk heroes.
'Hard is the fortune'
Given Vermont’s influx of immigrants, Irish music quickly crept in with tales about poverty and suffering, legends of people forced from their homeland and adrift. Some had a matter-of-fact sociological perspective: “Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind,” contends Myra Daniels in “Can You Court Lightly?” The verses go on to lament that wives are “slaves to their husbands.”
Quebecois influences and Negro hymns also gave the collection a less White Anglo-Saxon Protestant profile. The proponents of eugenics must have been horrified.
“In her research, she branched out to Americana in general — cowboy music, spirituals. She broadened her worldview,” Wentink said. “She was like a sponge, always absorbing new information.”
Flanders intermittently collaborated with mentors and helpers on the journey, which eventually took her to Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
She turned to Phillips Barry, a Harvard University-educated scholar who guided her methodology and stressed the need to zero in on every possible variation of a ballad as it morphed over the years.
Flanders most long-lasting assistant was Marguerite Olney, who did field recordings, transcribed them and served as the collection’s first curator at Middlebury.
As Flanders became more renowned, writing articles and books, she crossed paths with the era’s preeminent ethnomusicologist, Alan Lomax. He was then employed as a folklore archivist at the Library of Congress.
Apparently feeling territorial, Flanders sent a letter inviting him to the state, with this proviso: “I am letting you come into Vermont to go about as I do, with potential addresses of unknown quantity.”
A proprietary kerfuffle
In 1939, Lomax spent nine days recording a 99 songs, ten stories and 49 fiddle tunes on 12-inch discs. Flanders, who soon switched from the trusty dictaphone to this newfangled technology, shared credit with him on the labels. But Wentink thinks there may have been a proprietary kerfuffle regarding a number provided by Elmer George.
She also had a falling out with Marguerite Olney, who supposedly believed her 20 years of dedication to the cause were under-appreciated. The college eliminated her position in 1960, when Flanders stopped financing it. The collection fell into a long period of neglect, until the resurrection process was launched by curator Jennifer Post in 1979.
As the dreaded reality of radio closed in on them, Flanders maintained enduring relationships with the amateur performers, some of whom even went on tour with her around the region. The job had evolved into lecturer and impresario.
“It became her identity,” Wentink noted. “At first people might have considered her a dilettante, an interloper, but she plugged away at it so seriously that after a while she was acknowledged as an expert in the field.”
Deb Flanders sees herself carrying on an important family responsibility, to ensure that the songcatcher’s bounty is remembered. “I’m so privileged to be a part of this legacy,” she said. “But it’s not mine. It’s for everybody.”