Song Trailer: Carl Sandburg

The following excerpt is from page 11 of Norm Cohen’s Folk Song America: A 20th Century Revival (1991). I think his comment that Carl Sandburg’s “singing and guitar playing were highly idiosyncratic" is evident in Sandburg's version of “I Ride an Old Paint,” which is included on our primary listening samples. Plus, glad Norm Cohen used the word collectanea.

“About 1920 Lloyd Lewis, a Chicago newspaper reporter and the author of Myths after Lincoln, introduced Lomax to the great populist poet Carl Sandburg, and for several years the three men and others met periodically to sing and exchange folk songs. Sandburg (1878-1967) collected songs himself during his wanderings about the country, and in the 20s he began the practice of closing each of his poetry recitations with a few folk songs sung to his own guitar accompaniment. In 1927 he brought out The American Songbag, one of the first general folk song collections intended primarily for singing rather than scholarly consumption. His sources included his own collectanea as well as the collections of his friends Robert Winslow Gordon (the first head of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song and one of America’s pre-eminent folk song collectors in the 1920s) and John Lomax.

In the preceding year, Sandburg had recorded a half-dozen folk songs for the Victor Talking Machine Company, only two of which were issued (a sample of one is included in this set). While Lomax, in the early days at least, had intimate knowledge of the society that produced cowboy songs, Sandburg was a presenter who did not grow up in the folk society with whose materials he worked. Lomax’s slow, deliberate, declamatory style fitted his material comfortably, whereas Sandburg's singing and guitar playing were highly idiosyncratic, as listeners can judge for themselves.

Of Sandburg’s six 1926 recordings, which included cowboy and hobo songs, the only two issued selections were Negro material. Although knowledgeable listeners would have discerned that his style was not very traditional, in the 1920s the mere fact that he used a guitar instead of a piano and sang in an undecorated, untrained voice sufficed to label him a folk singer.”

…

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be
Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

from “Chicago,” in Chicago Poems (1916), Carl Sandburg