Some Real American Music
IT is generally believed that America has no folk-music, nothing distinctively native out of which a national school of advanced composition may arise. The commercial spirit of the age, and our conventional mode of existence, have so far effaced original types of character and romantic phases of life that the folk-song seems already a thing of the past.
Dvorák and a few other composers have indeed made use of negro themes, and the aboriginal Indian music has been seriously treated more than once. But these compositions, however excellent, are no expression of American life and character; they fall as strangely on our ears as any foreign product.
But there is hidden among the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas a people of whose inner nature and its musical expression almost nothing has been said. The music of the Southern mountaineer is not only peculiar, but, like himself, peculiarly American.
Nearly all mountaineers are singers. Their untrained voices are of good timbre, the women's being sweet and high and tremulous, and their sense of pitch and tone and harmony remarkably true. The fiddler or the banjo-player is well treated and beloved among them, like the minstrel of feudal days.
The mountain fiddler rarely cuddles his instrument under his chin; he sets it against the middle of his chest, and grasping his bow near the middle, wields it with a jiggling movement quite unlike the long sweep of the accomplished violinist's bow-arm. It is sometimes complained that their playing is too rapid and jerky; but the tunes are composed for this tempo, and no other would be found suitable.
Prominent among the elements of this music is that leading American characteristic, humor; not the sparkling wit of the French, nor the broad, clumsy jollification of the Teuton; not sarcasm nor irony, but the keen, wholesome, freakish American love of a laugh pervades directly or indirectly almost every line. The music, too, while usually minor, is not of a plaintive tendency; there are few laments, no sobbing and wailing. In this it differs radically from that of savage peoples. Neither has it any martial throb or clang. It is reflective, meditative, with a vein of genial and sunny philosophy; the tunes chuckle, not merrily, but in amused contemplation.
The mountaineer is fond of turning the joke on himself. He makes fun of his own poverty, his own shiftlessness, his ignorance, his hard luck, and his crimes:
I'll tune up my fiddle and rosin my bow,
And make myself welcome wherever I go.
I'll eat when I'm hungry and drink when I'm dry;
If a tree don't fall on me, I'll live till I die.
I went up on the mountain and give my horn a blow;
Ev'ry gal in the valley come running to the do'.
As I went down to my old field, I heard a mighty maulin';
The seed- ticks was a-splittin' rails; the chiggers was a-haulin'.
