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              Return to Table of Contents Flanders understood the urgency of collecting folk music right then. Let a radio into the house and people would soon stop singing their traditional songs—or worse still, they would become entranced by popular music heard over the airwaves and lose their own style. If the old songs were not collected soon, they would go to the graves with the people who knew them.
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The Flanders Ballad Collection, the largest archive of folk music and folklore from the northeastern states, serves as a window through which we can learn about the people of a region, their traditions, and their oral history. The approximately nine thousand items amassed between 1930 and 1960—including field recordings, manuscripts, song texts, broadsides, and hundreds of books relating to collections and studies about songs of Anglo-American, Canadian, and European origins—contain valuable and sometimes surprising information about our region and our forefathers. For me, this study is a personal tour of folksongs from a bygone era with lively asides by collector Helen Hartness Flanders—my grandmother. In reading her letters, diaries and papers, by going to the towns where she collected, through listening to field recordings and visiting with families of the people who recorded their songs, I am following her experiences and retracing her footsteps—and discovering that a simple committee assignment aroused such passionate interest that it became her life’s work.
In 1930, Gov. John Weeks, as part of his Commission on Vermont Country Life, appointed Helen Hartness Flanders, along with several other artists and writers, to the Committee on Traditions and Ideals. Her assignment was to find out what songs Vermonters had learned by oral tradition... Electricity was coming to rural Vermont, however, and Flanders understood the urgency of collecting folk music right then. Let a radio into the house and people would soon stop singing their traditional songs—or worse still, they would become entranced by popular music heard over the airwaves and lose their own style. If the old songs were not collected soon, they would go to the graves with the people who knew them. In fact, most informants were in their seventies or eighties, and many passed away within two or three years of the time Flanders met them. Following her yearlong assignment with the Committee on Traditions and Ideals and publication of the first of nine books, Vermont Folk Songs and Ballads, Flanders continued to collect... The first recordings, in the 1930s, were made on wax cylinders, and the car cigarette lighter was used as a source of electricity if the singer’s house had none. Between 1939 and 1949 aluminum and acetate discs were used, followed by reel-to-reel tapes... When the collection outgrew Flanders’s home, she donated it, in 1941, to Middlebury College, where it is now housed in Special Collections. Listening copies of the nearly 4,500 field recordings are available there as well as at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and at Harvard University. These recordings provide an overview of life and history in a particular region, all transmitted through ballads and folksongs. The informants represented every profession and every ethnic group in the population, and with few exceptions, they sang without instrumental accompaniment.
The Education of a Collector Helen Hartness Flanders was born in Springfield, Vermont, in 1890. She lived in Springfield all her life and was active in the community’s arts programs. It is no surprise that in 1930 she was appointed to the committee. She was both a pianist and a published poet, so her love of music and enjoyment of words easily translated into an interest in ballads and folksongs... She borrowed books from the Dartmouth College Library and contacted folklorists and other collectors. The two people most responsible for guiding her early song-collecting experiences were Harvard scholar and collector Phillips Barry (1880-1937) and Maine collector Fannie Hardy Eckstorm (1865-1946). Barry, founder of the Bulletin of the Folklore Society of the Northeast, taught her the techniques of fieldwork. Through extensive correspondence and during his yearly visits to her home in Vermont, he advised her on how to recognize song origins. Eckstorm, collector of Native American and Anglo-American Folklore from Maine, became a close friend and collaborated with Flanders on folksong articles in Maine newspapers. One of the people with whom she corresponded was collector Alan Lomax. She, like several collectors of that era, felt territorial about the region where she was collecting. In a 1939 letter, she wrote to him, "I am recognizing that by November 3, I am letting you come into Vermont to go about as I do, with potential addresses of unknown quantity." The majority of recordings collected during Lomax’s ten-day visit, by prior agreement, bear the names of both Flanders and Lomax.
Informant Marjorie Pierce, when interviewed in her ninety-sixth year, recalled the collecting visits and spoke of Flanders’s genuine interest in every member of her family. The informants shared their songs because Flanders let them know that they played an important role in the preservation of a living legacy. When the head of one family passed away, she brought her equipment to the house so that the family could hear his voice one last time... ... Thirty years, five hundred singers, and approximately forty-five hundred songs later, Flanders had created a massive collection. The list of song titles indicates an active transmission of ballads from the settlers’ musical heritage from the British Isles... Examples from the Collection The northeastern states yielded far more than Child ballads, however. People sang about Old World history ("Bonaparte on St. Helena’s Shore"), local events ("The Stratten Mountain Tragedy"), and recent history ("The Last Fierce Charge"). Song stories took place on land, on sea, in people’s memories, and in their imaginations. The early part of the twentieth century was the heyday of lumber camps in remote forests. It was in the bunkhouse at night that the loggers sang, and a favorite theme was their daily encounter with danger. In "The Jam on Gerry’s Rock," a river driver is killed when the logs break loose... Religion helped sustain people through the hard times in rural Vermont, but they expressed their faith in different ways. Many hymns are included in the collection—for example, the singing of Belle Richards and Lena Bourne Fish from New Hampshire... ... A beautiful and moving example of religious singing is the recording of Jessie Anthony’s "Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down." The daughter of a former slave, Jessie Anthony lived in Massachusetts. She contributed two dozen gospel songs for the collection and participated in at least one of Flanders’s concert-lectures. ...Snowstorm ballads form a group all their own in the Flanders collection. "In the Dense Woods" is a true winter tragedy set to music. When Jim Furnald becomes lost in the forest, three hundred souls join the search party, and after three days he is finally found—sitting on a log frozen to death...
New Englanders also had concerns about people being lost in the moral sense: succumbing to the evils of alcohol. The "Drunkard’s Dream" recounts the miseries of a wayward father who, drink in hand, leaves his family to suffer and be forgotten. "The Bird Song," an odd little temperance song, charmingly passes along its message in the chorus: "tea total tea total." Love stories—good and bad, true and fictional—were immortalized in broadsides, ballads, and folksongs. In the high drama genre, the collection includes several ballads in which a penknife is used for vengeance, and in at least one verse, blood oozes from a damsel’s pale bosom: She couldn’t escape her evil-minded lover, or her brothers failed to save her in time, or her father considered her lover unworthy and, when she wouldn’t obey, "laid her in her gore."...
Loss and nostalgia songs express many types of situations. The son leaving Ireland for America leaves the motherland as well as his mother. In "No One to Welcome Me Home," a weeping mother is left standing on the shore, covering her face with her apron. "The Banks of the Potomac" is one of many songs reminding us of the realities of war—the dying soldier gives final instructions to his comrade about what to tell his mother, his sister, and sweetheart. "The Brooklyn Fire" presents both the tragic event and a bold new hero. Songs also picture the plight of the Native Americans. "Indian Sitting in His Canoe" recalls the days before the conflict between native peoples and the European settlers. ... The influence of the Irish in the Flanders Ballad Collection is tremendous. Coming to New England in droves, the Irish sang ancient ballads, songs popular in Ireland before they left, and once in America, new songs describing their own pioneer experience—unemployment, poverty, and prejudice—as well as bouncy patter songs such as "Clancyֵs Wooden Wedding" or "Mrs. Fogarty’s Christmas Cake."... Though not represented in great numbers, French Americans deserve mention. ...The men in the fur trade who transported their goods downriver by canoe sang as they paddled. The rhythm of the paddles, dipping in and out of the water, transformed "A la Claire Fontaine," a lyrical tune, into a spirited work song. ***** Sadly, the tradition of singing has not been carried down to the recent generation in the informants’ families. Relatives of the singers smile with pride as they reminisce about the old ones, but the young ones don’t know the traditional songs. Some children and grandchildren weren’t even aware that their elders sang and were convinced only on hearing tapes of the field recordings. The French Americans are the exception. During a collecting session in the Lecours family’s kitchen last summer, I was told, "That’s what we do when we get together." Singing is still part of their life even though the style has changed with the times. The format is still call-and-response, but a cappella singing is less common, now that some family members play guitar. Before or after a song, someone is likely to mention the name of a family member who has passed away. Swapping stories about the person who used to sing a certain song and, in their eyes, owned that song is very much a part of the French American musical gatherings today....The volume and variety of materials in the Flanders Ballad Collection are a testimony to that human desire to express and transmit traditions, personal memories, and historical records. Between the lines of these songs are the legacies of human beings who lived in a time when people sang, and when singing had the power to enrich and define their lives. The excerpts and photos are from "Helen Hartness Flanders: The Green Mountain Songcatcher" by Nancy-Jean Ballard Seigel published in Voices Vol. 29, Fall-Winter 2003. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now. HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | MUSIC | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP |
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