Singers and Storytellers Page: 36
v, 298 p. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this book.
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SINGERS AND STORYTELLERS
tend to try to give the piece a modern frame of reference, tend
to prepare it for such an audience, by changing it toward
sophisticated song. The text is regularized in grammar, dialect,
and meter. Crudities are smoothed out: Lord Randall is sick
at his heart rather than at the stomach.
They took out his bowels and stretched
out his feet
And garnished him over with lilies
so sweet
becomes
They lowered him down in the grave
so deep
And there he takes his sleep.
Then disregarding the fact that the ballad is a story, they give
it an instrumental accompaniment: guitar, banjo, autoharp,
even a piano, and finally the singer tries to make it his personal
song by singing it in a highly stylized manner.
And so the ballad has not remained in the high hills and
lonely mountains; it has come to the radio, to the night club,
the juke box, Carnegie Hall. The result is that a whole gen-
eration is growing up with confused and downright wrong
ideas about the ballad and folksong in general. The whole
problem may be one of semantics. We confuse the utilization
of folksong by sophisticated artists with folksong. We call
Richard Dyer Bennett, Cynthia Gooding, Harry Belafonte
folksingers just because they use folksongs and folk melodies
as the basis for the songs they sing. Let me illustrate: A few
months ago I found myself in a night club in New York. The
place was so dark that we should have been equipped with
miners' head lights to make our way around. A cacophonous
din was being created by a group of musicians, some of whom
were twisting their bodies into the most grotesque positions
as if they were experiencing exquisite agony. There was the
odor of tobacco smoke, mixed with the sweetish odor of36
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Singers and Storytellers (Book)
Collection of popular folklore of Texas, including personal anecdotes about storytellers and singers, as well as folk songs, myths, and ghost stories. The index begins on page 295.
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Boatright, Mody C. Singers and Storytellers, book, 1961; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc67655/m1/42/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Press.