What Was the Song Hush Little Baby About?
Putting A Face up on Folksong Sources: The Story of Annie Brewer'south Lullaby A common "folk song" has a surprisingly tangled story behind it. How did Annie Brewer's version of a lullaby go a well-known folk song that supposedly belongs to usa all? Does it really belong to Brewer's heirs, to the folklorist who put a microphone in front of her in 1937, or to the library it sits in? Most of us have at to the lowest degree a bones understanding of the thought that jokes, slang terms, nursery rhymes, expressions and songs sometimes filter downwards on peak of us like cultural volcanic ash. We don't know where "Liar, liar pants on fire" or "London Bridge is falling down" came from or why we know what they are, though this process in the 21st century is less connected to the distant past. A number of melodies and songs, similar "Yankee Doodle," are genuine widely distributed folk songs, though they probably spread far more now by audio recordings than past one person hearing some other person sing them. For the about part, we can't accurately trace songs backwards to figure out how they spread around or where they originated, but a scattering of very well-known "folk songs" have left enough footprints that nosotros can follow at to the lowest degree parts of their travels. One of those is the simple children's lullaby, "Hush, Piddling Baby," where papa is going to purchase the baby a mockingbird, a looking glass, a diamond ring, a cart and balderdash, a baton goat, or a domestic dog named Rover. We know almost cypher near what it did before near 1920, but since 1937 it has left all sorts of tracks. Let's endeavour to sympathize what made that song surface from the huge pool of songs to accept a similar form within the heads of large numbers of people. For such a simple little song, it raises all sorts of interesting issues and questions. Folk Song Collecting Especially in the showtime half of the 20th century, chasing the relatively new thought of the "archaic survival" of songs from the past in the memories of illiterate and rural people, dozens of bookish and self-appointed folksong collectors excitedly rounded up a large number of American and British Isles folk songs using whatever tools they could. Sparked by the ground-breaking publication of the ten volumes of " English & Scottish Pop Ballads " by Francis Child commencement in 1882, the collectors were greatly empowered and assisted by the use of cylinder recording machines that conveniently showed up in the 1890s. Thomas Edison developed his "phonograph" auto, that merely weighed most 30 pounds, using bare wax cylinders that could capture shut to iv minutes of sound via the ear-trumpet horn that could exist used for playback or recording. It became a new sport to travel around rural areas with i, befriend the local people and endeavour to capture some important or heady music. Dorothy Scarborough, Mellinger Henry, Lawrence Gellert, Natalie Curtis, Cecil Sharp, Howard Odum, E.C. Perrow, John Jacob Niles, John and Alan Lomax and others did extensive collecting. The results of their efforts are still important and relevant, especially because what they recorded were genuine things that real people actually did. More haphazardly than systematically, working either independently or with a library or university, these "songcatchers" collected, labeled, transcribed and archived the songs they found into a number of individual and public collections. They also put some of the songs into books and curated record albums, often editing, consolidating and modifying them equally they saw fit. Though the goal was to locate, document, annal and share what they found, a sizable chunk of this orally-transmitted folklore that was supposedly being celebrated for its ability to spread around amongst the people, was instead deliberately moved into quite dissimilar data streams. This had the effect of agonizing and greatly altering the bodily transmittal processes, and instead of existence passed on from a neighbor or family member, these songs took a very different road into all the people who subsequently learned them. In an effort that spanned roughly two generations, for the most part ending with my own, dozens and possibly hundreds of artificially-inseminated folk songs, collected from scattered individuals, were put into the bloodstream of American folk music in a type of Jurassic Park experiment. Led by John and Alan Lomax, and involving Charles Seeger, Robert Gordon and a band of enthusiasts centered in and effectually the Archive of Folksong at the Library of Congress, they organized an effort to inject mitt-picked "folk songs" into public consciousness, and also into simple music curriculums across the land. These songs were deemed superior to the European ones that had long been used in music education, which was probably true. The children liked them better and learned them faster, and information technology seemed appropriate for more than of the music they were learning in school to be American folk songs. Though many were non commonplace or widely-known songs, they became just that for the children who absorbed them via this information pipeline. Folksingers, both professional and amateur, besides began learning and performing many of these songs, and on the heels of the Folk Boom of the 1950s, they blasted them all over the globe by way of vast numbers of tape albums, concerts, books and radio or tv broadcasts. Millions of Americans, including very young children, had dozens of these songs implanted in their memories, put there past music teachers, camp counselors, and "folk era" recordings. None of us in our lives always heard the "original" field recordings of these folk songs, or were even told that they existed. You lot or I could have used those to learn the songs if we had access to the recordings, but instead nosotros got the songs past way of an intermediary step where they were repackaged into songbooks with piano note, and sung with guitars or banjos by educated generally-white, eye-class people, or delivered past school teachers reading arrangements at their pianos. A few authentic rural performers, both black and white, managed to be heard in functioning or on recordings doing more or less original versions, merely the vast majority of the transmission of "folk songs" to the listeners came from 2nd or 3rd generation "sources." Peradventure the assumption was that we all had the right to get to Washington, D.C. and go into the Library of Congress athenaeum and look at or heed to whatever original source textile was there, and maybe that meant we did have access to it. "The Erie Canal," "Red River Valley," "Skip to My Lou," "Streets of Laredo," "Shenandoah," "She'll Exist Comin' "Round the Mountain," "Home on the Range," "Clementine," "Cindy," "On Top of One-time Smoky," "I Ride An Old Paint," "This Old Human being," "Old MacDonald Had A Farm," "I've Been Working on the Railroad"– and many more such songs became role of the cultural inheritance of our country– not just by natural processes, but greatly assisted by the efforts, perceptions and choices of a pocket-sized number of very motivated white people who felt that they were on an important mission. (I can't detect evidence that any not-white people were a meaning part of that folk song team, though an African-American singer and guitarist named Leslie Riddle was a fundamental gene in the vocal collecting efforts of A.P. Carter for influential early recordings made past the Carter Family.) More than fifty years agone, versions of these songs were permanently stuck into my head, as well every bit those of untold numbers of other people of a like age who were also exposed to them. Maybe because I am a musician I have a better retention for them than nigh, and thus more of a feeling that vital real estate in my mental difficult drive was loaded with a bunch of questionable songs before I had whatever idea what was going on. I sound a bit like an anti-vaxxer hither, and I am honestly non sure whether or not it would have been ameliorate to only let the capitalist market make full everyone'due south heads with music when they are young, which it has certainly done extensively without anyone'south permission or blessings. I don't become a sense that people born later about 1960 had nearly as many of these songs embedded into them, unless they had older siblings or parents that passed them on. As schoolhouse music education has shrunk and changed, that part of the pipeline has not been doing much in contempo decades, and young children today no longer announced to exist learning well-nigh of these same songs. Some are being re-written and turned into copyrightable material by publishers, though as far as I can tell, a handful of stalwarts remain in contemporary elementary schoolhouse music educational activity. My kids recognize the tune for what I know equally "Skip to My Lou," but not the words I am familiar with, though luckily for them they don't know "Clementine," unless a modern YouTuber or meme creator has recently re-used that melody for something. Before the late 1940s, most no 1 knew these folk songs or versions of them except the families or neighbors of the folklorists' sources, notwithstanding inside near xxx years they had been turned into bogus bedrock in our commonage folksong landscape. Considering this is getting tangled, and many of you are decorated, I'll tell you my conclusion now: Instead of the collectors hiding, copyrighting, manipulating and profiting from the songs in the archives, I wish that we the people could become costless and easy access to the original collections ourselves, and so we tin can decide what songs we like or which ones we want to learn. The idea that nosotros have been spoon-fed these somewhat-doctored versions of folk songs is bad enough, merely to never become to hear the field recordings is worse, and to have been given a rather phony folk heritage and a bunch of Dolly-the-sheep genetically-engineered songs is intolerable. Let's wait at a well-known example, in hopes y'all'll amend understand why this is bugging me. Nineteen years earlier Lomax found Brewer, folklorist Cecil Sharp collected two other variants of the vocal, that had markedly dissimilar tunes and words, both used "Papa" non "Mama." 1 was collected on Baronial 23, 1918 from Lucy Cannady of Endicott, Virginia, ("Hush niggling minnie and don't say a word, Papa's going to buy you a mockingbird/ It can whistle and information technology can sing, it can do well-nigh annihilation...") and another from Julie Boone of Micaville, North Carolina, on Oct 8, 1918 ("Hush up, baby don't say a give-and-take...If information technology can't whistle and it tin can't sing, Papa's going to buy you a diamond band..." The song certainly seems to behave like a widespread folk song, though it bears a resemblance to an 1884 minstrel-era vocal by F. Belasco called "Hush Piffling Babe, Don't You Cry." At that place is no way to determine if that song was an original source, or itself based on an already-circulating folk vocal. Bernice Haynes besides sang some other version into Lomax's machine on May 21, 1939 well-nigh Varner, Arkansas, with a unlike tune and quite unlike words. That is currently the only one available to hear on the Library of Congress web site, in a situation that looks suspiciously similar a blazon of misdirection, since no ane knows or has copied the Haynes version. Annie Brewer's version of "Hush, Li'l Baby" is labeled "restricted" in the catalog of the Library of Congress, though it is conspicuously the source of the words and the tune that people now know. All the common and loftier-profile versions are most identical to hers, although she sang "Momma" instead of the now-common "Papa." Other than that word, Brewer's version became the source for numerous recordings by pop artists, and the song became known by millions of people who believed it be a folk vocal that they somehow just knew. After spending an unknown amount of time inside Brewer'southward head, it lived for 4 years on Lomax's aluminum disc, and then was put into a series of books, beginning with the John & Alan Lomax " Our Singing Land " in 1941. The vocal and so appeared on a number of recordings, beginning with The Weavers in 1951, where they substituted "Papa" for "Mama," giving them "plausible deniability" of some sort as to whether it was lifted from Brewer's version. The residue of the words and the melody are Brewer's, except for changing won't to don't, adding and before every poesy, and changing "turns brass" to "is contumely." That recording was followed by Burl Ives, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary, Jean Ritchie, Ed McCurdy, John Langstaff, Milt Okun, Sandy & Caroline Paton, Nina Simone, Mike & Peggy Seeger, Carly Simon & James Taylor, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Celtic Woman and numerous others. Here is my Spotify playlist of 12 of those versions. (Interestingly, both Milt Okun and Mike Seeger sing "Momma", and "turns brass," staying closer to the Brewer version.) There are now an most uncountable number of lullaby recordings, children'southward music albums and "music for babies" vocal and instrumental versions– other than Nina Simone'due south modified melody all of them characteristic the identical Annie Brewer tune and words slightly adapted past Pete Seeger, except on the last line where Brewer sings "You'll be the sweetest girl in town." All the published and recorded versions out there are labeled "Public Domain," and Annie Brewer's contribution, though essential and undoubtedly the source of all the others, has been lost, ignored, forgotten or removed. Folksinger Pete Seeger's stepmother, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, was paid a dollar (really $300 for 300 songs) in 1940 to listen to the aluminum recording disc, and to write the musical notation that was put in the book (above), which is a fascinating story in its own right (that I intend to tell in some other posting), since she was a highly-respected modernist composer, also as the mother of Mike & Peggy Seeger and the music editor of the 1941 book. (She inverse "suspension downward" to "fall downwardly" and left out a final unintelligible verse that ends "You'll still be comatose past one-half past nine.") It'south non much of a clandestine where the Weavers got the song, since Pete was in that group, his father worked for the Library of Congress, and his dad's second wife, that he married when Pete was xiii, had the aluminum disc in the firm and listened to it repeatedly as she wrote the song down. Pete was 18 when Brewer made the field recording, 22 when the book came out, and perchance lived at home so later dropping out of Harvard in 1938, and probable heard the Brewer recording himself. He worked in 1939 at the Archive of Folksong profitable Alan Lomax, though he was 32 and a founding member of the Weavers in 1951 when they put that song on their anthology Folk Songs of America and Other Lands . The previous twelvemonth the folk quartet had scored a huge #1 pop hit with the million-selling "Goodnight Irene," and they reached the elevation of the pop charts once more in early 1951 with Seeger'south arrangement of "On Top of Old Smoky," also a "collected" and modified folk song. The 43-2d-long a capella original Annie Brewer "Hush, Li'50 Baby" (listen to it here) was issued by Rounder Records in 2001 on an album of field recordings, itemize #1829, titled "Deep River of Vocal: From Lullabies to Dejection," with the copyright notice that the sound recording was owned and licensed by The Association for Cultural Disinterestedness, a 501(c3) non-profit corporation, "housed" at Hunter College in New York City. That entity was founded in 1983 past John Lomax's son Alan Lomax, at the age of 67, xx years earlier his death. The song is said to exist under "exclusive license to Rounder Records," which appears to mean that Rounder struck a deal with Lomax's corporation to re-result songs from the annal, presumably including the Library of Congress, since that song has been ostensibly under their command in the Archive of Folk Vocal since 1937. Oddly, the LOC explains quite carefully that "Items created past Library of Congress employees in the scope of their employment are U.S. Authorities works not field of study to copyright in the United states..." which appears to say that because John Lomax was working for the government when he collected the vocal, neither his son'southward corporation or Rounder Records has a correct to its copyright. The only entity among those three who created annihilation was Annie Brewer. I'm not a lawyer, simply this might say that because her version of that song was taken from her past someone who was working for the regime, the sound recording is somehow endemic by the government, or maybe not under copyright. Because she did non file paperwork claiming information technology as hers, she also appears to have forfeited whatsoever claim to owning either the song itself, her organisation of it, or of the sound recording of her phonation singing it. All of this cleverly obscures the fact that the version everyone knows is Brewer'due south with very pocket-size variations, while nosotros take that diverse people took it and inverse it a little considering information technology was just a folk vocal. None of Brewer'southward 12 collected songs are bachelor to hear in audio format from the LOC, though "Hush Little Baby" and an original song of hers titled "Roosevelt Blues" have appeared on commercial albums of compilations of field recordings, licensed by the Lomax organization. When folk music producer Milt Okun recorded "Hush Little Infant" in 1957 for his America'southward Best-Loved Folk Songs LP on Baton records, it was presumably learned from either the Lomax book or the Weavers' recording, but was credited as Public Domain. Since Okun produced and helped create Peter, Paul & Mary 5 years later, it stands to reason that they learned the song from him, or from the Weavers straight, and almost certainly not from the 1941 volume or a trip to the Library of Congress. Okun may have learned it from the book, since he sang "Momma" and "turns brass," though like the Weavers he added the word "And" in front of every verse, which Brewer did not do. When John Lomax put the song in his 1941 collection, he personally claimed the copyright to all the textile in the book, with the sentence: "All rights reserved-- no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except past a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connexion with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper." (I wonder if I am violating his copyright past reproducing his copyright observe.) The question poses itself of whether it is fair or reasonable that Annie Brewer surrendered her correct to ownership of her version of the song as shortly as Lomax captured it on a regime field recording. Does she and her estate permanently forfeit any claim to any money the song generates? Does Lomax'south copyright merits include her words and melody, or but whatever new or written things were added? Considering all this happened earlier the Copyright Act of 1976, it is probably truthful that the only way she would have legal standing to claim any buying of the song was if she had filed paperwork with the Copyright Office prior to or before long after publication– and since Lomax presumably did that, he got the poker fries. Confusingly, Congress has still non completely weighed in on the issue of who owns sound recordings fabricated before 1972, and for decades it has been based on state law. Especially in the case of non-modern states like Alabama, their legislatures oftentimes never bothered to even write such a law, which may be the reason that the Lomax organization still controls that sound recording. Copyright laws involving folk songs are very subtle, and the scattering of cases that have gone some altitude through the courts make information technology articulate that about of the bug are not so clear or broadly applicable to all folk songs. It's possible that you or I tin can record or perform that song without violating anyone'due south intellectual property, only we couldn't put Brewer's recording itself on an album compilation. There needs to be a good-sized clamper of money at pale before it is in anybody's best interest to hire lawyers, which could mean that this puzzling situation will remain the style information technology is as long every bit no one sues anyone. So when I bought an mp3 digital download of that song from Amazon for $i.29 in 2019, did Annie Brewer'southward estate deserve or get any of that money? Should the recording be bachelor for complimentary listening or download on the LOC web site? Did the record company, the Library of Congress or the ACE go some or all of my money? There can't be much money involved for sales of that recording, but streaming royalties can add up, and and then exercise the mechanicals for all the other derivative recorded versions that are too streaming and being sold. The aggregate sum of sales and streaming for all the folk songs from the all the collections that are circulating must generate a measurable amount of coin every yr. Is it mostly going to salaries and office expenses for the non-profit organizations, as is frequently the case? The ACE website says that "ACE repatriates artists' rights and royalties to their estates and families, and returns our media collections to those who created them and their places of origin," nonetheless a Google search for the phrases "©1937 past Annie Brewer," "© by Annie Brewer" return nada hits, other than books by some other author of that name. I plant this caption: "The American Folklife Middle, the Librarian of The Library of Congress, and Anna Lomax Forest worked out a unique partnership past which the Library got the originals (and digital copies) of Alan Lomax's works and ACE put them into wide circulation." How does Lomax's corporation still control and perhaps make money from this song that was taken from Annie Brewer 82 years ago when Lomax's father was an employee of the U.S. authorities, and 64 years before information technology was licensed to Rounder? Where does Annie Brewer'southward contribution or creative ownership figure into the current condition and income of the song and the recording? I confess to wondering, even a little angrily, at what legal or economic forces gave Lomax or the LOC the legal right to advisable ownership of Annie Brewer's vocal for near 100 years, or in virtual perpetuity as they collect their streaming royalties unchallenged? The 1941 folksong volume sold poorly, and any royalty money it generated would have been a pittance. That outcome was consequent with Lomax'south expectations and justifications, since both he and his son Alan repeatedly said that because they were working hard to preserve and propagate American folk music, they should not be faulted for claiming a minor compensation. Simply the story of the paid and unpaid royalty money that all the hundreds of recordings of that song and others like it have generated is rarely discussed publicly, and something well-nigh this state of affairs bothers me and peradventure should carp you too. (Maybe a dainty folklorist will stumble on this post and kindly explain to me why I should not be troubled by whatever of this.) From what I have read near ownership of sometime photographs, whatsoever that Lomax took of Annie Brewer would presumably be considered to be holding of her manor, unless peradventure the photographer was working for the government. Perhaps because she was poor and blackness and had no lawyer or professional advice, is she permanently out of luck claiming any legal correct to her likeness or music, even though the words and melody that seem to have come from her have sold large numbers of recordings? Politicians talk today about reparations to attempt to correct the wrongs of slavery, and there have been quite a number of instances where Native Americans have had significant amounts of land returned to them once it became clear that treaties were violated in the past. When the hugely-pop and very influential movie " O Brother Where Art Thou " came out in 2000, it contained "folk songs" in the Grammy-winning soundtrack. Music producer T-Bone Burnett did something both honorable and unusual: he located and paid the original sources. Early in the movie, it featured a 1959 Alan Lomax field recording of "Po' Lazarus," that was recorded at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi Land Penitentiary, where inmate James Carter led a group of prisoners in singing while chopping logs at the prison. Burnett, Don Fleming and Lomax'southward daughter Anna tracked down the 75-year old Carter in a tenement in Chicago, and paid him $twenty,000 in royalty money, mark a very unusual result in what might be termed "folk music reparations." It would be impossible to retroactively collect royalty money from all the recordings of "Hush, Niggling Baby" and to pay them to the heirs of Annie Brewer, if in that location are any, and the use of the original sound recording in a movie is a legally different thing from recording a version of someone else'due south copyrighted song. But does that mean nosotros simply do nada, and let the song and its beau "collected" folk songs continue to accrue streaming and download royalties worldwide while knowing full well that none of the money is going to the source of the music? Is anyone in accuse of making sure that happens– is there any "honour organization" in sociology song collecting? Alan Lomax was happy to collect 1/3 of the royalties from the Kingston Trio's hit version of "Tom Dooley," though his claim to information technology wasn't much unlike from what happened to Annie Brewer. The source of "Tom Dooley," North Carolina banjo player Frank Proffitt, concluded upwardly with a 1/three share, split with the collector (heirs of Frank Warner) and the song's publisher (Lomax.) The positive trend I think I see, which I promise is really happening, is that the skewing of the folksong Deoxyribonucleic acid that was caused past the over-energetic folksong advocates of the 20th century is slowly righting itself. Immature people are getting increasing access to the archives of old recordings, and are feeling costless to enjoy, learn, similar or dislike what they find there, which is exactly what should have been happening all along. Folklorists should not play Folksong God or try to breed songs in captivity, and I doubtable that the populist and sometimes socialist folksong collectors of the past might even agree wholeheartedly that the information forces should but let us all hear the music that was taken from our "sources." To many of us, they are every bit sacred as the bones of ancestors are to Indians and other people with deep connections to the past. If y'all know more about this song or its saga let me know. This is another posting where I'm trying to raise issues, questions and sensation in the world of modern troubadours... You deserve a reward or a door prize for making it to the finish. Delight check dorsum to wait for new posts every bit I go them done. I plan to embrace a wide range of problems and topics. I don't accept a fashion for yous to comment here, but I welcome your emails with your reactions. Feel gratuitous to cheer me on, or to disagree... Chordally yours, HARVEY REID ©2020 |
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