“Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies”: White Womanhood and Folk Song Collection in Early Twentieth Century America

Aldona Ann Dye Honolulu, HI

Bachelor of Arts, St. John’s College, 2010 Master of Fine Arts, Brandeis University, 2014

A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Music

University of Virginia May 2021

Bonnie Gordon, Advisor Karl Hagstrom Miller Richard Will Michael Puri Sarah Milov

Dye ii

Abstract

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a large number of middle- to upper-class white women did fieldwork collecting folk songs, yet the scope and impact of their work has remained largely unexplored in scholarly literature. To explore this phenomenon, this dissertation consults four archived collections of white women song collectors and organizations that relied on the song collecting work of white women: The Virginia Folklore Society of Charlottesville, VA; Annabel Morris Buchanan of Marion, VA; Ruby Pickens Tartt of Livingston, AL; and Helen Heffron Roberts, who did ethnographic work in Honolulu, HI. My research reveals that the daily lives of white women in the early twentieth century—who were involved in the teaching profession, held membership in women’s music clubs, oversaw the maintenance of their family homes, and for whom music-making was a part of their girlhood education—put them in proximity to folk songs and gave them the tools with which to apply to folk song collecting. This dissertation further identifies traditions of white womanhood, such as song transcription, amateur musicianship, and creative fiction writing, shaping the work of white women folk song collectors. “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies”: White Womanhood and Folksong Collection in Early Twentieth Century America argues that these traditions of white womanhood, as they were used in the practice of song collecting reinforced structures of race, class, and gender, often explicitly in the service of maintaining a white supremacist culture and advancing the missives of American colonialism and imperialism. Ultimately, this dissertation cautions against a “white feminist” read of these song collectors and argues that exploration into the “women’s work” of folk song collecting both illuminates the structures of white womanhood in the early twentieth century and contributes a crucial component to the complex history and legacy of American folk song collection.

Dye iii

Acknowledgements

This dissertation could not have made it to its current form without the support and guidance of a large network of people that I am immensely grateful to have in my life. Bonnie Gordon has been a fantastic advocate during my entire graduate school journey. She introduced me to the University of Virginia’s archive in my first year as a graduate student, and her work has consistently modeled the ways archive scholarship could be urgent and vibrant. As an advisor, Bonnie was my biggest cheerleader, championing my work in her own public speaking engagements and in more private conversations with her peers. When my post-PhD plans shifted away from the academy, Bonnie’s quick recognition and equally quick shift to brainstorming and encouraging new possibilities for my scholarship made me feel understood, inspired, and eager for the journey ahead. The faculty in the music department at UVa pushed me to think deeply and write clearly. Karl Hagstrom Miller’s graduate seminars broke down the structure of academic writing, from books reviews to monographs, giving me tools that have been valuable throughout graduate school and continue to inform the way I read and write. In meetings, Karl would respond to ideas with an enthusiastic “Yeah, man!” before loading me up with new books to read and new ways to push my ideas forward. It was in Richard Will’s seminar on folk music where I first discovered the Virginia Folklore Society, and during a subsequent comps exam on folk song collection he encouraged me to look for more women’s stories in the archives. Michael Puri always read my work carefully and brought a similar depth and thoroughness to our discussions in a way that reminded me of my earlier education at St. John’s College. The graduate students I’ve had the pleasure of knowing both as friends and as colleagues have modeled the way an academic community can be filled with support and encouragement rather than isolation and competition. The ways in which they have done this over the course of seven years are too numerous and intangible to put into words here, but my heartfelt gratitude goes out to Kyle Chattleton, Steven Lewis, Stephanie Gunst, Tracy Stewart, Victoria Clark, Stephanie Doktor, Craig Comen, Sophie Abramowitz, Maya Hislop, Sam Golter, Ryan Maguire, and many others who have made graduate school an experience of comraderie and solidarity. I am so excited to be in community with you all and to see our work and ideas travel beyond ourselves in ways we can’t even imagine right now. So much of the research for this dissertation took place in library archives, and I owe so much to the work and support of library staff. Steve Villereal was an early connection as someone else working on Virginia Folklore Society material, and has since become a friend. The staff at the Small Special Collections Library at UVa—primarily Penny, Heather, Ann, Krystal, and Regina—made me look forward to each new trip diving into the Virginia Folklore Society’s papers. Sheila Whitehead was a great resource and fantastic conversation partner when I traveled to Livingston, Alabama, to study Ruby Pickens Tartt’s papers at the University of Western Alabama. Todd Harvey and Nancy Groce at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center have been wonderful sources of knowledge and encouragement during my visits to the library and my presentation at the kickoff event for the LoC’s Women Documenting the World series. The special collections staff at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—particularly Matt Turi and Aaron Smithers—encouraged my work on Annabel Morris Buchanan during a Dye iv short research trip and a subsequent month-long research fellowship. I cannot wait to get back in the library when I turn this dissertation into a book. Others lent their time and insight reading chapters of this dissertation, and for that I thank Tes Slominski and Danielle Fossler-Lucier. Lisa Goff’s public history internship program at UVa introduced me to the world of public history and connected me to several people who have opened my eyes and inspired me to seek new avenues for my scholarship. I extend a hearty appreciation to Ina Dixon and Sarah Milov, who were excellent mentors at the two internships I did through Dr. Goff’s program, and whose scholarship continues to excite and inspire me. I am happy to call the staff at The Haven my friends, and now my colleagues, and I am so grateful that I began volunteering there during some of my coldest nights. An additional thanks goes out to Elizabeth Smiley, who was my therapist during the last half of my graduate school journey, and who helped me to get curious about my self and my parts. My work and thinking owes as much to her as it does to my academic mentors and colleagues. My family and friends have been irreplaceable fountains of support throughout this whole journey, and it is thanks to them that I leave what can often be a solitary journey feeling connected and rooted in love. My parents, Tom Dye and Jun Look, my sister Veronica Dye, and my best friend Jennifer Roper delivered advice and encouragement that I felt in my soul in a way that you only get from those who have known and loved you deeply for a very long time. My partner Daniel Bachman sets my imagination ablaze and is always introducing me to new things that open my eyes and my heart to the beauty and depth in the world around us. I am so happy to be here with you all and I cannot wait to see what we build together.

Dye 1

Introduction

The Traipsin’ Woman, Jean Thomas’ semi-autobiographical account of the origins of the

American Folk Song Festival, begins with a man propositioning a woman. The man is

“the most famous criminal lawyer in the State of Kentucky,” the woman is a fictionalized version of Thomas herself (and the narrator of the story), and the proposition is a job offer as a court stenographer in a murder trial.1 Our narrator possesses the only skill needed for the job ("all you need to do is to write shorthand—and read it”) due to training from the only business school in the foothills of Blank County, likely a fictional stand-in for Thomas’ real home in Boyd County, Kentucky.2 She soon finds herself being carted up the mountains, her mind anxiously racing with thoughts of the violent, clannish mountain folk. “How, I wondered would these dangerous fellows look upon me, a woman court stenographer? Maybe they’d take matters into their own hands and put an end to me forthwith!”3

The narrator’s nerves are only slightly calmed by memories of her old music teacher, who had given her music and singing lessons and had taught her about old ballads. “There’s a wealth of ballads in these very mountains,” the music teacher had often said before regaling her eager student with stories of chivalry and strains from “the brown girl,” the “gypsy lady” and “the lady fair.”4 The music teacher’s guidance comes in handy during the narrator’s first night in the mountains, when she hears a young man with “a voice that might have packed the Metropolitan” singing a ballad that echoes

1 Jean Thomas, The Traipsin’ Woman (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1933), 12–13. 2 Thomas, 12–13. 3 Thomas, 22–23. 4 Thomas, 16. Dye 2 down the mountainside.5 Instantly forgetting her fear, the narrator tiptoes to the window with a notebook and pencil and records the verses of the ballad, which she deems “too fine to be lost.”6 When she realizes in court the next day that the singer is the very murderer whose trial she is tasked with documenting, and when she learns that he committed the murder to defend his sister’s honor from a man who was slandering her name, the narrator comes to view him as a chivalrous knight in a ballad rather than as a backwards killer.

She soon discovers that, save for a few notable exceptions, the Kentucky mountain people are warm and welcoming. Moreover, her position as a “short-writer” and her constantly-present portable typewriter work to her advantage, as the mountain folk come to her with ballads and stories for “that yaller-haired woman” to document.

When, for instance, an old woman stops by to see the lawyer, she stays to sing “many a rare Elizabethan ballad” as the narrator records, “patiently going over and over again the

‘hard places’ until I ‘ketched hit right.’”7

Over time, the narrator comes to self-identify with her great-grandmother, who used to live in the mountains, and when she leaves to be a “script girl” in Hollywood, she soon returns to Kentucky, deeming Hollywood fake compared to the “authentic”

Kentucky mountains. Inspired by Hollywood productions, though, the narrator gets to work organizing a “Singin’ Gatherin’,” the fictional equivalent of the American Folk

Song Festival, which the real Jean Thomas ran for four decades, from 1932-1972. At the

5 Thomas, 25. 6 Thomas, 25. 7 Thomas, 138. Dye 3 singin’ gatherin’, the mountain people of Kentucky are framed as exemplar American citizens, and their ballads as the central piece of American musical history.

This is history […] For the first time in the annals of our nation, America’s musical history has been portrayed by authentic minstrels; minstrels to whom our unwritten song has been handed down by word of mouth. Kentucky mountain folk who have held intact as a sacrosanct heirloom that unwritten song which was brought across the deep, into the wilderness, by our Anglo-Saxon forbears, and here held safe in mountain fastnesses. This epic that has taken place here today on this rustic stage we owe to a Traipsin’ Woman with a portable typewriter—.8

Thomas’ fictional origin story of the American Folk Song Festival is of interest to this dissertation for two reasons. First, skills that the narrator gained through growing up as a white woman in the early twentieth century prove central to her success as a song collector. Her musical training gives her an ear for melody and an appreciation of the old ballads, and her training as a stenographer gives her the ability to record sung lyrics quickly and accurately. Second, the narrator’s own view of the Kentucky mountain folk as “authentic” and “Anglo-Saxon” shapes their portrayal in her folk song festival. The mountain people do not define themselves as more “real” than others (even though they are wary of “furriners”), and they do not link themselves to Elizabethan England, or even to America at large. It is the song collector’s outsider view, and her experience working in California, that leads her to portray them in this way.

This dissertation, “‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies’: White Womanhood and Folk Song Collection in Early Twentieth Century America,” calls attention to the large number of educated white women working as song collectors in the United States in

8 Thomas, 272. Dye 4 the first half of the twentieth century. Thomas was far from the only educated white woman collecting songs in the field; indeed, she was not even the only one who organized a folk song festival to showcase her work. My work explores how social practices and institutional structures specific to white women of a certain class standing facilitated their song collecting while shaping the collecting practice itself. It identifies traditions of white womanhood—most often amateur musicianship, the ability to transcribe songs by ear, and creative fiction writing—and specific racialized and gendered roles—such as schoolteacher, music club leadership, and mistress of the home—that are highly visible and impactful in collecting practice and the collected work.

Moreover, it explores how these practices, specifically when used in the task of song collecting, worked in many ways to uphold societal structures of white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism.

Listening to the archives of female folk collectors inflects the story of roots music and music collecting with gender. In his study of “roots music” and public memory,

Benjamin Filene took a brief moment to acknowledge the large number of women in this music genre’s history. Filene noted the preponderance of women’s names that appear on their own or alongside men’s in collectors’ fieldnotes, along with the large number of women singers and the popularity of piano books featuring folk songs.9 While recognizing that “the majority of folk canonizers have been male,” Filene wrote in a footnote, “It might be argued that even as men and women pursue the same basic

9 Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music, Cultural Studies of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 20. Dye 5 strategies of folk music collecting, they bring different perspectives to the task. This hypothesis would be worth exploring in a future study.”10

But these women are much more than a footnote. In this study I look at women who worked as schoolteachers, homemakers, music club officials, ethnographers, writers, and composers, many of whom had musical training, exploring the structures of race, gender and class that informed the perspectives and practices they brought to their folk music work. Musical training in particular was a common gateway to song collecting that also gave the collector a framework for documenting and interpreting songs. As it was for

Jean Thomas’ narrator, music was often the tool through which the collector rendered a

“foreign” or “threatening” culture accessible and non-threatening to a white audience.

Musical notation and Western musical conventions were used as the standard by which to judge whether a folk culture was legible or “developed.”

To gain insight into the ways that structures of white womanhood shaped folk song collection in early twentieth century America, I investigate four examples of white women song collectors working with three different American folk populations: the white mountaineers of the Appalachian mountains, the black former slaves in the Deep South, and the indigenous populations of the American West and the Hawaiian Islands. Each chapter has an example of how white women collectors used their musical skills to document and translate the songs they were collecting, and each shows how the collector’s race, gender, and class position directly shaped their relationships with the musicians they collected from, the music they collected, and the people and institutions for whom they worked. Chapter One explores the Virginia Folklore Society’s partnership

10 Filene, 6, 237n4. Dye 6 with the state teachers association, a collaboration that encouraged young women teachers to collect ballads and, I argue, brought music to the fore of what was a primarily literary society in its inception. Chapter Two looks at folk festival organizer Annabel

Morris Buchanan’s attempts to create a national music based on the modes of “Anglo-

American” folk singers, an effort she carried out largely within the structures of women’s music clubs. In Chapter Three, I take Alabama song collector Ruby Pickens Tartt as a case study through which to view the maintenance of antebellum racial hierarchy within the twentieth century white Southern home, and the tradition of white women using their black slaves and servants as central subjects in creative works aimed at white audiences.

The final chapter takes us to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where I argue that ethnographer Helen Heffron Roberts’ musical knowledge functioned as the tool through which she carried out the aims of U.S. imperialism in her Hawaii recording trip, much as it did for her colleagues who recorded the music of American Indians.

Archived collections are the primary source material for this dissertation.The materials are housed in various universities’ special collections catalog, and collectors often had their own collection of papers. The subjects I chose for this study are by no means the only ones of their kind, nor are they the only ones with accessible archived papers. The Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, recognizing their large and under-explored collections by women folklorists and ethnographers, recently launched a multi-year initiative inviting scholars to study the contributions of women in their public collection. This initiative speaks to the timeliness of this study, and also to the possibility of many future studies using a similar methodological and analytical framework. This study is limited chronologically to recognize a period of widespread, institutionally Dye 7 funded song collecting. It is also limited to educated white women in order to analyze the race, gender, and class structures of that time. Further studies based on the archived collections of women folklorists and ethnographers that take a different scope will likely result in different, but complimentary, conclusions that will help round out our understanding of American folk song collection.

Interventions

My project builds on existing scholarship in two general areas of study: critical analyses of the discourse surrounding folklore field work and the folklore studies discipline, and histories of the lives and work of white women in America. These bodies of scholarship have helped me to consider the ways traditions of race, gender, class, and power help to form strategies for collecting, analyzing, and using folk music, and how these traditions are carried out by individuals working within their networks and communities to spread, perpetuate, and shape knowledge. For a study on white women, many of whom worked at the margins of large institutions of knowledge, and whose work often reflected and reinforced empirical knowledge and systems of inequality, keeping both theories and bodies of knowledge in mind is essential. While often relegated to perform different labor than those at the center of institutional bodies, and just as often working within networks comprising other educated white women like themselves, the subjects of this study nevertheless drew from institutional knowledge and directly helped to shape it.

Folklore and “Authenticity” Dye 8

The critical literature on the discourse surrounding folklore work and studies has centered on an examination of the concept of “authenticity” as it is used to define “the folk” and

“folk culture.” Studies that have contributed to this dialogue have focused on how notions of authenticity have been used to separate folk music from popular music, position folksingers outside of modernity, and draw tight boundaries around who and what can be considered “folk.” In 1992, Robin D. G. Kelley responded to scholars who retained an idea of folk culture’s authentic purity by arguing, “Unless we deconstruct the terms ‘folk’ and ‘authentic’ […] and see ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ as mutually constitutive and constituting, we will miss the dynamic process by which culture is created as well as its relationship to constantly shifting experiences, changes in technologies, and commodification.”11 In the decades that followed, scholars dissected the notion of folk authenticity, revealing the underlying assumptions that guided twentieth century folklore studies and shaped the academic discipline as well as the popular music industry.

Regina Bendix, analyzing the formation of the academic field of folklore studies, observed that American folklore studies had accepted the concept of folk “authenticity” to mean only that which was linked to the past, at risk of dying out, and isolated from

“mainstream” society.12 Scholars of popular music have found this notion of “authentic” folk in their realm as well. Benjamin Filene, in an examination of the canon of “roots” music, found that twentieth century field recordings made by collectors like John and

Alan Lomax have been accepted as “authentic” American roots music and used as source

11 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk,’” The American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (1992): 1402. 12 Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). Dye 9 material for revivals throughout the twentieth century.13 Filene argues that by treating these recordings as pure, apolitical documents, we fail to recognize the ways in which decisions made by the fieldworker altered, shaped, and erased aspects of the recorded music and the musician being recorded. Karl Hagstrom Miller has shown that categories and qualifications established by academic folklorists had massive effects on their treatment by the popular music industry, particularly when categorizing and marketing music along racial lines.14 Although white and black southern musicians had often learned from each other and played similar repertoires, record executives marketed white music as “hillbilly” and black music as “race records.” This “segregated sound” persists to this day, Miller argues, informing popular ideas about what “blues” and “country” artists look and sound like, and keeping nineteenth century ideas of racial folk authenticity in the present-day discourse.

These studies contribute important critiques of the idea of folk “authenticity,” but are primarily centered on institutions like universities and the popular music industry and, as such, do not critically address women’s work in folk song collection. On the other hand, existing studies of the work of women folklorist, ethnographers, and song collectors usually take the form of biography and do not focus on a critical look at the structures and traditions of white womanhood in the folklore work.15 While valuable contributions to the study of women that worked with folk music, these studies all too

13 Filene, Romancing the Folk. 14 Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 15 For some recent examples, see: Elizabeth DiSavino, Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky’s Forgotten Ballad Collector (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2020); Joan M. Jensen and Michelle Wick Patterson, Travels with Frances Densmore: Her Life, Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Michael Ann Williams, Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Dye 10 often frame these women as “exceptional” or view their work relative to that of song collecting men, whereas here I identify song collecting work as part of a larger, shared tradition of white womanhood wherever possible. I also directly address white supremacy as a significant factor in the structures and traditions associated with white womanhood, a factor that scholars have marginalized in existing studies of women folklorists.

The case of David Whisnant and Michael Ann Williams, both folk historians, provides a nicely encapsulating example of the issue this dissertation addresses.

Whisnant’s investigation of the “politics of culture” in Appalachia is a rare example of a critical study that isn’t explicitly focused on gender but takes women folklorists and song collectors as its main central subjects.16 In a roundtable discussion of All That is Native and Fine, however, folklorist Michael Ann Williams observed that Whisnant did not address the motivations of his subjects: “The women Whisnant writes about may well have been paving their way to hell, but I’m not sure that we ever fully understand their motivations.”17 In her own study of National Folk Festival founder Sarah Gertrude Knott,

Williams worked to correct this imbalance, exploring Knott’s long career as festival organizer, and noting how Knott struggled to reconcile her early career in drama with her folklore work.18 However, Williams gave Knott a pass on her racist actions; acknowledging that Knott’s notions of African American folklore were “romantic” and

“patronizing,” Williams nevertheless in the next sentence declared Knott’s decision to

16 David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine : The Politics of Culture in an American Region, 25th Anniversary Edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 17 Ted Olson et al., “Native and Fine and Enduring: A Roundtable on David Whisnant’s All That Is Native and Fine [with Response],” Journal of Appalachian Studies 16, no. 1/2 (2010): 107. In his response, Whisnant agreed with this criticism. 18 Williams, Staging Tradition. Dye 11 consult African American folklorists and include African American folklore in her festival “nothing less than heroic.”19

Women’s (Musical) Work

Over the last half-century, musicologists have uncovered fantastic new insights into the musical lives of women, to which I am very indebted. These historians have studied less- examined materials, like women’s and girls’ diaries and women’s publications, and have read materials “against the grain” to reveal a complex, vibrant history of women’s music making. Ruth Solie’s study of the Victorian “piano girl” identified the piano—a staple in the Victorian household—as a central part of a young girl’s education.20 Music historian

Candace Bailey has shown how “public” and “private” spheres applied to women’s music making in her history of Southern women composers around the Civil War. “Public” musical performance was considered shameful in many planter-class Southern households, she notes, so the large number of Southern women who published their compositions in the middle of the nineteenth century attests to their strong feelings about their musicianship and artistic voice.21

These music historians have also noted the large role women held as professional

“keepers of culture” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Judith Tick has noted that in the 1890s particularly, the Victorian piano girl Solie wrote about had

19 Williams, 174–75. “It is true that Knott’s notions of African American folklore were limited and all too often romantic and patronizing. Yet she did consult the leading African American folklorists of her day…and her efforts to present African American folklore in the festival’s early days…are nothing less than heroic.” 20 Ruth A. Solie, Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004). 21 Candace Bailey, Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Dye 12

“passed away” and women began to work more as professional composers, musicians, and music teachers.22 As Gavin James Campbell shows, the increase of women as patrons of music caused anxieties about the increasing “feminization” of learning, teaching, literature, the fine arts, music, the church, and the theater.23 In her study of women as modernist composers before World War I, Catherine Parsons Smith has chronicled a simultaneous development of misogynistic attitudes in the modernist movement that were hostile to women composers and shut them out of the movement.24 Smith argues that the anxious attempts by male composers and music critics to frame modernist pieces as masculine actually demonstrated the powerful place women held in the modernist movement.

Music scholars and historians of that same period have taken notice of the power of women’s music clubs, social groups centered on amateur musicianship, performance, and music education.25 Musicologist Marion Wilson Kimber has shown that while activities in women’s music clubs waned during and after the Great Depression, the

National League of American Pen Women organized high profile events and adapted their promotions to remain relevant. She argues that the work of composer Phyllis Fergus helped the Pen Women secure two concerts in the Roosevelt White House, and notes that the Pen Women stressed the “Americanness” of their women composers in an effort to

22 Judith Tick, “Passed Away Is the Piano Girl: Changes in American Musical Life, 1870-1900,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 326. 23 Gavin James Campbell, “Classical Music and the Politics of Gender in America, 1900-1925,” American Music 21, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 448. 24 Catherine Parsons Smith, ““A Distinguishing Virility": Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. Susan Cook and Judy Tsou (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 90–106. 25 Karen J Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890-1930, Philanthropic Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Dye 13 attract audiences.26 Linda Whitesitt acknowledges the importance of women’s work in music but notes that clubwomen’s influence was most often conservative and elitist, as they used their money to bring European groups to America rather than supporting local orchestras and chamber groups, and generally preferred European compositions over

American ones.27 Overall, these studies, which attest to the breadth and depth of women’s involvement in music making and the arts, have been of great benefit to this study, as it is easier to draw connections between folk music work and the myriad musical involvements in the lives of the study’s subjects.

These musicological histories largely focus on white women, and largely neglect to take a critical look at race or colonialism within these women’s practices. In this regard, this dissertation also draws on two recent historical studies that have called attention to the way white women specifically have upheld white supremacist structures—one focused on the nineteenth century, and one on the twentieth. These studies identify traditions of white womanhood based in white supremacist power that are passed down to young girls as part of their childhood education, also showing the ways that women- centric organizations and social networks serve as well-functioning vehicles with which to carry those traditions forward. Stephanie Jones-Rogers’ They Were Her Property:

White Women as Slave Owners in the American South shows that not only did white women own slaves, but that their girlhood education explicitly prepared them to become slave-owning mistresses, and in adulthood they were keen protectors of the “property”

26 Marian Wilson Kimber, “Women Composers at the White House: The National League of American Pen Women and Phyllis Fergus’s Advocacy for Women in American Music,” Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 4 (November 2018): 478. 27 Linda Whitesitt, “Women as ‘Keepers of Culture’: Music Clubs, Community Concert Series, and Symphony Orchestras,” in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860, ed. Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 65. Dye 14 they managed.28 The study also expands on Kirsten Wood’s study of slaveholding widows.29 Whereas Wood demonstrates that widows owned and wielded power over enslaved people given to them after the death of their husbands, Jones-Rogers argues that women didn’t need to wait until widowhood to exercise the power and control over enslaved people that most associate with plantation masters. Wealthy wives in the slaveholding South were equally masterful participants in maintaining white supremacist property rights as white men.

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s study of white women’s activism on behalf of segregation and Jim Crow shows white women’s commitment to upholding white supremacist racial order well into the twentieth century.30 McRae’s study shows that not only did white women have the same ideological goals as white supremacist men, who receive the lion’s share of scholarly attention, but that they used channels and outlets established in their everyday lives to carry out these goals. “These women guaranteed that racial segregation seeped into the nooks and crannies of public life and private matters,” she writes, “of congressional campaigns and PTA meetings, of cotton policy and household economies, and of textbook debates and day care decisions.”31 McRae reveals that white women did not merely work within the structures of white supremacy but, when it was threatened, actively worked to sustain it. Moreover, the networks established by white women were crucial strategic tools in this fight.

28 Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property : White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 29 Kirsten E. Wood, Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 30 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018). 31 McRae, 4. Dye 15

This dissertation argues that folklore work is an ideal place to explore the intersection of folkloric “authenticity,” women’s musical lives and work, and the politics of race, gender, and class, as women song collectors often were directly confronted with musical cultures different from their own and were tasked with interpreting them and identifying key representatives and key features of those cultures. The way white women ethnographers understood, interpreted, and valued the folk music they encountered on collecting missions depended largely on their musical training. It also depended on their positionality as educated white women relative to those who they collected from, who were most often poor, not white, and/or were considered more foreign than American.

Although I do not always link their actions to a white supremacist framework (though I often do), I argue that understanding white women’s musical lives and the ways in which they operated within a white-dominant society is essential to interpreting their work as folklorists.

Chapter Summaries

My four chapters contain four distinctly different case studies, and as such, I do not offer a totalizing theory of white womanhood or its relation to song collecting in the early twentieth century. Rather, in each, I highlight a different facet of white womanhood and use it to interrogate their scope and aim regarding collected material. The first chapter functions more as an introduction to the contributions that were the direct result of white women’s labor in the field, while the latter three examine the ways in which white women collectors interpreted and used collected material from three distinct American folk cultures. Dye 16

Chapter One examines the impacts of the Virginia Folklore Society’s partnership with the state teachers’ association to enlist schoolteachers as ballad collectors. I look at the strict race and gender segregation of Virginia’s public school system and teachers colleges in the early twentieth century, arguing that the “Virginia Method” of ballad collecting essentially created a gendered division of labor, in which a ballad collecting force largely made up of educated white women submitted their fieldwork to men at the university, who judged the ballad’s relevance and edited it for publication. I then argue that the teachers were responsible for bringing music to the fore of what was primarily a literary society at its outset by transcribing songs and advocating for equal consideration to be given to the music of the ballads. Finally, I argue that the Virginia Folklore

Society’s decision to widen and decentralize its collecting body, while problematic in its adherence to a strictly segregated system, offers possibilities for a more democratic model than does the solo “collector-editor” model. Collector Alfreda Peel of Salem,

Virginia, formed unique relationships with singers, advocated for “by the people for the people” festivals, and did her own folklore work outside of the bounds of the society. I argue that Peel’s involvement with the Virginia Folklore Society transgressed established labor divisions and helped to reframe the society’s original top-down model.

In Chapter Two, I investigate the white nationalist aims of Virginia folklorist and festival organizer Annabel Morris Buchanan. Buchanan utilized her standing in music club leadership to argue for an investment in the collection of “Anglo-American” folk songs, particularly for use by white composers to connect with their racial heritage and compose works that used the “Anglo-American” folk modes to signify a new national sound. In this chapter, I draw comparisons between Buchanan’s interest in the modal Dye 17 properties of the music of the supposedly pure Anglo-Saxon mountaineers and the concurrent eugenics movement, which sought to create a white America through a purportedly scientific investigation of heritage and bloodlines. I argue that women’s music clubs offered Buchanan a stage for her white nationalist agenda, while obscuring or overlooking her eugenicist ties.

Chapter Three explores the tradition of white women drawing inspiration from their enslaved black laborers through Ruby Pickens Tartt, a Livingston, Alabama, collector of African American folk songs who served as the point-of-contact for John and

Alan Lomax on their Library of Congress Southern recording trips. I show that Tartt’s affinity for black folk music was directly linked to her childhood experiences of making enslaved people perform for her, a dynamic that continued into the twentieth century when the Lomaxes visited. I examine the enduring structures of racial hierarchy within the twentieth century white Southern home, and I compare Tartt to other Southern white women who used black subjects at the center of their work—folklorist Dorothy

Scarborough and writer Julia Peterkin—arguing that what connects these women is a shared impulse to find selfhood through the creative expression of their black laborers.

I finish the project by analyzing white women’s imperialist ethnography through an examination of ethnomusicologist Helen Heffron Roberts’ 1924 recording trip to

Hawaii. Roberts, a Boaz-trained ethnographer, drew on extensive earlier musical education for her Hawaiian recording trip. Drawing from Agawu’s theory of tonality as a colonizing force, I argue that Roberts’ knowledge of Western musical standards gave her the authority to declare Hawaiian music “rudimentary” and the Hawaiians as “in so simple a stage of culture,” due to their lack of emphasis on melody. In this chapter, I put Dye 18

Roberts into context alongside her colleagues Frances Densmore and Alice Fletcher, who recorded American Indian music, framing all three as agents of U.S. imperialist westward expansion. I also contrast Roberts’ trip with two concurrent popular Hawaiian music circuits—hula and slide guitar—to address the agency of Hawaiian musicians and the endurance of Hawaiian music and culture, both in the islands and within the continental

U.S.

The conclusion reflects on the action that this dissertation advocates, asking what exactly we gain by bringing the work and voices of educated white women into the discourse of folk music and folklore studies. Examining recent efforts to highlight women collectors by the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Folkways, I argue that institutional examination of white women folklorists has largely remained limited by a non-intersectional approach centered on inclusion. There remain many possibilities for a critical, intersectional analysis of song collectors and an intersectional approach to researching the archived folklore collection. I suggest that this dissertation helps us to further examine the structures and traditions of power that frame the practice of song collecting and the field of folk music research, arguing that such work is crucial if the ultimate goal is doing away with those very power structures.

Dye 19

Chapter 1: “A Corps of Trained Workers”: Virginia’s Ballad Collecting Schoolteachers

In August of 1932, Alfreda Marion Peel, a schoolteacher from Salem, Virginia, sat before a recording machine operated by Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., an English professor at the

University of Virginia and archivist of the Virginia Folklore Society. In the living room of her Salem home, Peel recorded five old English ballads, including “The Devil’s Nine

Questions,” a tune she had learned from Mary Lafon Martin of Giles County, Virginia, about a decade before. On these recordings, now housed in the University of Virginia’s

Special Collections Library, one often struggles to hear Peel’s voice over the pops and scratches on the aluminum disk on which her voice is inscribed, but when it comes through the listener hears a thin, high soprano. She hits her notes decidedly rather than gliding up to them, and embellishes a few notes with vibrato. Her words are precisely articulated, and her accent skews more Mid-Atlantic than Virginia twang. Peel’s slow delivery and clear articulation suggest that Peel knew her recording would be used to help the Virginia Folklore Society make more accurate transcriptions of Virginia ballads;

Peel’s decade-plus involvement with the Society and her work organizing the 1932 ballad trip also speak to this. Peel’s sung melody exactly matches the tune sung by Martin as transcribed by Miss Evelyn Rex, a public-school music teacher from Richmond who assisted Peel by making musical transcriptions of the tunes Peel discovered on her ballad- hunting trips. Alfreda Peel was likely following sheet music or carefully remembering

Martin’s melody when singing “The Devil’s Nine Questions” for the microphone in 1932. Dye 20

Figure 1. “The Devil’s Nine Questions,” in Arthur Kyle Davis, ed. Traditional Ballads of Virginia. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929).

When Virginia folk singer Texas Gladden recorded “The Devil’s Nine Questions” for

Alan Lomax in 1941, she sang roughly the same melody. Gladden confirmed the lineage of “The Devil’s Nine Questions,” announcing to Lomax, “I learned that one from Alfreda.

It’s an old English ballad that dates back about forty years before Columbus, I think…”32

Featured in a collection of Anglo-American ballads compiled by Lomax for the Library of Congress’ Folk Music of the United States Series, Gladden’s version of “The Devil’s

Nine Questions” is far more centralized than Mary Lafon Martin’s or Alfreda Peel’s. It stands as a representative of Appalachian balladry in a collection intended for public consumption and educational use, compiled by a folklorist at the center of the narrative of

American folk song collection. Placed within the lineage of Peel’s recording, Evelyn

32 Texas Gladden, Texas Gladden: Ballad Legacy, CD, Alan Lomax Collection (Rounder Records, 2001). Dye 21

Rex’s earlier transcription, and the collection of the song from Mary Martin, however,

“The Devil’s Nine Questions” is part of a much larger story of folk song collection and documentation, one that precedes Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress and instead centers on a state folklore society and a group of women who collected and transcribed folk songs in the Appalachian mountains nearly three decades earlier.

In this chapter, I explore the Virginia Folklore Society, who, at their inception in

1913, called on schoolteachers to assist them in collecting English and Scottish ballads in

Virginia. I examine the consequences of such a partnership, the main one being the introduction of a large number of women in the Virginia ballad collecting effort. In the first decades of the twentieth century, teaching was coded as a feminine profession, an association that began in the nineteenth century and was concretized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with segregated education schools like the State Female

Normal School in Farmville, where the Virginia Folklore Society established a ballad club. I argue that the teachers’ main contribution to the Virginia Folklore Society was their fierce advocacy for recording the music of the ballad airs, an aspect of ballad collecting that was not prioritized in the academic study of ballads. Bringing skills of music performance and transcription to their fieldwork, skills likely formed as part of their upbringing as white, educated women and developed in their classrooms, the schoolteachers expanded the society’s initial vision and scope to include melodic transcriptions and performance of Virginia folk songs, even beyond the English and

Scottish ballads. The transcribed sheet music, a large part of the Virginia Folklore

Society’s archives papers, is lasting evidence of the teachers’ large contributions. Dye 22

I also argue that the redistribution of collecting labor, from the standardized practice of one collector-editor to a larger collection of more localized workers, opened up the possibility for a more democratic system of folklore study that would become more common over the course of the twentieth century. The work of Alfreda Peel, a

Virginia schoolteacher, ballad collector, and witch-lore enthusiast, runs through this chapter and provides its ideological core. Peel’s work with the Virginia Folklore Society highlights some of the primary contributions made by women collectors, but also represents a commitment to the folk singers and their local knowledge that would ultimately distinguish the Virginia Folklore Society from their rivals, the group of folklorists organizing the White Top Folk Festival that included Annabel Morris

Buchanan (another white woman collector explored in my second chapter). Peel considered herself working on behalf of the folk, as opposed to Buchanan, who Peel criticized for exploiting Virginia folk singers for her own agenda. I examine Peel’s work and her criticism of Buchanan in order to avoid making essentialist claims about white women collectors and also to explore an avenue out of a top-down institutional model of folklore work.

Alfreda Peel was one of many educated white women who gave their time, labor, and expertise to the Virginia Folklore Society. The Society collaborated with Virginia’s public education system, relying on a robust team of musicians and schoolteachers throughout the state to collect ballads and submit them to professors at the University of

Virginia, who edited and compiled them for publication. This method and partnership was centralized in the stated aims of the Virginia Folklore Society, and was boasted about in official literature and in surveys of state folklore societies. Such a collaboration meant Dye 23 that the practice of collecting folk songs by Virginia’s state folklore society was inevitably tied up with a segregated education system that enrolled and employed the white women who made up a large part of the collecting body. However, while acknowledging the rigid structures surrounding race and gender in such a system, this chapter leaves room for the possibilities that can arise from inviting new voices into the practice of folk song collection and the study of folklore.

“A Great Movement in Which Everyone Can Help”: Schoolteachers as Song Catchers

The Virginia Folklore Society was founded on April 17, 1913, by C. Alphonso Smith, an

Edgar Allen Poe Professor of English at the University of Virginia. The Virginia Folklore

Society was one of several state folklore societies founded by English professors dedicated to systematically documenting Appalachia’s rich song heritage; the others were in North Carolina and Kentucky, founded in 1912, and in West Virginia, established in

1915. Academics were excited by a recent discovery of fifty-six of Harvard folklorist

Francis James Child’s English and Scottish popular ballads being sung in the United

States.33 Virginia in particular was considered rich in ballads: twenty-six of those

American versions of Child ballads had already been found in the state, and five of those twenty-six had been found in no other state. In a public document titled, “A Great

Movement in Which Everyone Can Help,” Alphonso Smith called for a widespread ballad collecting movement and quoted Sidney Lanier’s words that those who knew ballads would be, “manful in necessary fight, fair in trade, loyal in love, generous to the

33 Filene, Romancing the Folk. Dye 24 poor, tender in the household, prudent in living, plain in speech, merry upon occasion, simple in behavior, and honest in all things.”34

Smith’s romantic vision of folk morality and vigor had its roots in the work of eighteenth-century German philosopher and literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder. In a

1773 criticism of a German translation of the poetry of the mythic Scottish bard Ossian,

Herder decried the “artifices” in the German translation and the written word in general.

Meant to be read while seated, Herder claimed, the translation into a written medium ruined the “lyrical, living, dance-like quality of the song.” Herder reminded his correspondent that, “[t]he more remote a people is from an artificial, scientific manner of thinking, speaking, and writing, the less its songs are made for paper and print, he less its verses are written for the dead letter.”35 Herder ended with a call to collect and study old

German folk songs; a return to folk knowledge passed on by oral tradition, he surmised, might remedy the ills of a print-based society.

Folk songs were similarly linked to a mythical ancient folk, and surviving ballads considered to be a living link to modern society’s more primitive past. In the academy, the study of ballad poetry in America linked the nation to a Teutonic or an Anglo-Saxon heritage as well as an early model of democracy, what Harvard folklorist Frances Barton

Gummere called the “cadent feet” of “the imagined community” of ancient balladeers.36

The American Folk-Lore Society was established in 1888, and in 1892 its president

34 Virginia. State Board of Education, Virginia Folk-Lore Society: A Great Movement to Collect and Save to the State and Nation the English and Scottish Ballads Surviving in This Commonwealth. Teachers, Pupils and School Patrons Asked to Help (Richmond: D. Bottom, Superintendent of Public Print, 1914). 35 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples,” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, ed. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 156. 36 Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular From the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Dye 25 remarked on the relief of “occasionally glancing backward” while the rest of the world was focused on progressing forward.37 Francis James Child, the Harvard folklorist who began academic interest of folklore in America, considered his English and Scottish

Popular Ballads as products of an idyllic classless society, as folklorist Michael J. Bell summarizes, “Popular poetry is above class, or, more accurately, both before and beyond class. The popular ballad is the poetry of a people untouched by modern civilization's need to create and acknowledge distinction.”38 Those who troubled by the individualism driving modern ideas of progress and industry hoped that they might benefit from the knowledge of a pre-industrial society.

Academics and antiquarians interested in ballads went off searching for

“authentic” pre-industrial populations who retained and passed on ancient knowledge through being isolated from modern society. Scholar seeking American versions of

Child’s English and Scottish popular ballads were drawn to the Appalachian Mountains because of their supposed isolation from modern society and connection to Elizabethan

England. Early academic study of Appalachian ballads was predicated on the idea of the ballads as surviving remnants of old English and Scottish poetry. British folklorist Cecil

Sharp said as much on a ballad hunting trip to Appalachia: “The people are just English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. They speak English, look English, and their manners are old-fashioned English.”39 A view of the Appalachian mountain people as a completely isolated population was key to maintaining this idea; in his isolation, the

37 Journal of American Folklore, Vol. V, January-March 1892, No. XVI. 38 Michael J. Bell, “‘No Borders to the Ballad Maker’s Art’: Francis James Child and the Politics of the People,” Western Folklore 47, no. 4 (1988): 295. 39 Cecil Sharp, quoted in John R. Gold and George Revill, “Gathering the Voices of the People? Cecil Sharp, Cultural Hybridity, and the Folk Music of Appalachia,” GeoJournal 65, no. 1/2 (February 2006): 60. Dye 26 mountaineer was supposedly closer to Old England than he was to modern America. The mythical mountaineer lived so far in the mountains that he would not have seen minstrel shows and would not have known Tin Pan Alley pop tunes; he was illiterate and thus could not learn ballads from printed books and broadsheets; and he was of pure Anglo-

Saxon heritage and his musical repertoire was entirely informed by this heritage rather than African-American or Native American traditions.40 Song collector Howard

Brockway put it succinctly when he wrote of traveling to the Cumberland Mountains from New York: “I had not prepared myself for the astounding fact that I was to find myself transported back to the eighteenth century! […] We stepped out of New York into the life of the frontier settler of Daniel Boone’s time!”41

At its founding, Virginia Folklore Society leadership expressed an anxiety that modern American society would be ruined if songs yet to be discovered by them were to remain unknown by them. In “A Great Movement,” Smith positioned homes and schoolrooms as the biggest victims of this potential loss, envisioning a decline in the character of future generations of Americans. Teachers and mothers raising their children on modern music and literature were doomed to raise children devoid of the strength and character that molded early Colonial settlers.

Catchy, but empty, songs not worthy of comparison with them, the decadence of communal singing, the growing diversity of interests, the appeal to what is divisive and

40 Many studies have exposed this romantic idea of the Appalachian mountaineer as the fantasy it is. Henry Shapiro’s early study locates the earliest examples of the romantic mountaineer image in fiction writing crafted by Northerners. Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia On Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). Karl Hagstrom Miller has documented folklorists in the early twentieth century actively ignoring or denying evidence of literacy or hybrid musical performance. Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, 103. Benjamin Filene has asserted that the myth of the white ballad singer as America’s “true” folk successfully blocked African American folk music from gaining a central place in the emerging canon of American folk music. Filene, Romancing the Folk, 27. 41 Howard Brockaway, “The Quest of the Lonesome Tunes,” The Art World 2, no. 3 (June 1917): 227. Dye 27

separative in our national life, the presence of the artificial and self-conscious in modern writing are depriving our homes and schoolrooms of a kind of literature which, for community of feeling, for vigor of narrative, for vividness of portraiture, and for utter simplicity of style and content is not surpassed in the whole history of English or American song.42

If teachers were among those most affected by a loss of ballad knowledge, they were also fundamental to its salvation. Teachers were the key to the Virginia Folklore Society’s entire operation; not only could teachers fill classrooms with worthy ballad literature and teach their students the importance of communal singing, but teachers could help the

Virginia Folklore Society’s efforts by becoming collectors themselves. Smith directly called upon teachers to aid the ballad collection effort, writing, ‘[t]he teachers of the

State, however, especially those in the common schools, can help most effectively.”43 The classroom itself was framed as an ideal place where teachers could begin collecting. “If

[the ballads requested] are all unfamiliar to you,” Smith wrote, “perhaps there is a pupil in your school, or a parent, or a patron, or a friend not connected with the school, who knows or is likely to know several of them.”44 The Department of Public Education and the Virginia Journal of Education promoted the folklore society in their publications, the society’s annual meetings were held jointly with the State Teachers Association, and the society established Ballad Clubs at State Teachers Colleges throughout the state. The

42 Virginia State Board of Education, Virginia Folk-Lore Society: A Great Movement to Collect and Save to the State and Nation the English and Scottish Ballads Surviving in This Commonwealth. Teachers, Pupils and School Patrons Asked to Help. Emphasis mine. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. Dye 28

Society continued to meet annually in conjunction with the Virginia Education

Association until the mid-1970s.45

The Virginia Folklore Society established ballad clubs at several state teacher’s colleges in order to pique the interest of teachers-in-training and prepare them for their fieldwork in the classroom. By far the most prominent of the Virginia Folklore Society’s

Ballad Clubs was the one established at the State Female Normal School in Farmville. In its March 1913 issue, The Focus, the normal school’s periodical, reported the founding of the ballad club following a speech given to the students by Alphonso Smith. In his speech, Smith said that normal school students made for ideal ballad collectors because as teachers they would travel to all parts of the state, especially the rural areas, coming in contact with folks living far away from the modernized world.46 The basic structure of the ballad clubs was simple: club members brought in Appalachian versions of Child ballads collected from students or family members, The Focus would print some collected ballads, thus raising more interest in them and the club, and the Virginia Folklore Society would receive all collected ballads. The Ballad Club at Farmville grabbed the attention of authoritative figures in the field of folklore. In February 1914, The Focus reported that

George Lyman Kittredge, the Harvard folklorist who the Focus called, “our leading ballad authority,” had heard of the ballad club and sent them a note. It read: “This report of your Ballad Club is extraordinarily interesting to me. You are doing wonderful work.”47 Kittredge added that he had become a subscriber to The Focus in order not to miss any ballad club updates.

45 “The Virginia Folklore Society,” accessed September 18, 2019, http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/vafolk/. 46 State Female Normal School (Farmville and Longwood College, “The Focus,” March, 1913. 47 Ibid., Feb., 1914, 47. Dye 29

Virginia schoolteachers became a “corps of trained workers” collecting ballads in the field and submitting them to English professors at the University of Virginia, who edited the received ballads and compiled them for publication. In 1930, archivist Arthur

Kyle Davis, who took over in 1924 after the death of Alphonso Smith, wrote an article,

“On the Collecting and Editing of Ballads,” in which he stressed the importance of

Virginia schoolteachers, placing them at the very center of society’s work.48 This decision set the Virginia Folklore Society apart from the other state folklore societies, and quickly became a source of pride for the Society. Unbeknownst to Smith and the Virginia

Folklore Society at the time of its founding, however, the “Virginia method,” as Davis referred to it, also invited outside voices, primarily those of middle-to-upper-class educated white women, into the academic study. In this section, I will show how the

“Virginia method” effectively created a gendered division of labor between the practices of collecting and editing ballads. The Virginia Folklore Society not only divided the work of collector and editor but also argued for the efficiency and appropriateness of this division by highlighting the different skills needed for each job, and the aptness of each group of workers in embodying those skills. In the context of the teaching profession and the normal school in early twentieth century America, both spaces that belonged to middle-to-upper-class white women, I frame the practice of collecting ballads as women’s work. This gendered division of labor still took place in the white upper-class space of the academy; thus, the “Virginia method” highlights the scope of white upper- class life and labor in early twentieth century Virginia. A study of the Virginia Folklore

48 “This plan to link the ballad quest with the educational system of the state constitutes perhaps the most significant and distinctive element of what I call the Virginia method.” Arthur Kyle Davis Jr., “On the Collecting and Editing of Ballads,” American Speech 5, no. 6 (1930): 452–55. Dye 30

Society’s ballad collection practices is not complete without a recognition of the historical and social context of educated white womanhood in early twentieth century

Virginia.

There were many benefits to “the Virginia method.” A sort of Ford assembly line model of folklore work, the method was seen as a modern innovation in ballad collecting that sped up the process considerably. It did not require the folklorist to be a skilled jack- of-all-trades, but rather divided the labor among those thought to be most suited to each task. While prominent folklorists like Cecil Sharp did the work of collecting ballads and editing their work for published volumes, this method, while effective in controlling the quality of collected materials, was ineffective for quickly collecting ballads from a large region like the State of Virginia. Davis argued that “the trend of modern ballad work is necessarily toward organization and a division of labor,” and offered the Virginia

Folklore Society as a model. Although he acknowledged that Sharp’s method ensured that every step of the work was done by a ballad professional, the benefit of the speed at which the Virginia Folklore Society could work far outweighed the cost of dealing with

“poorly trained field workers.”

Arthur Kyle Davis considered the division of labor efficient because it allowed both collectors and editors to make use of skills they already possessed without needing to learn new skills they were unsuited for. The professional academic folklorist became less of a fieldworker and more of a commander-in-chief—a “collector-in-chief,” as Davis put it—whose duty was to inspire ballad collecting in others, and delegate work to scores of workers below him rather than taking on the messy work himself. With collecting work outsourced to schoolteachers, the professors at the University of Virginia, could Dye 31 attend to the scientific work they were supposedly better equipped to perform. Described by Davis as “men of academic bent, little suited to actual work in the field and with only a small fraction of their time to devote to ballad work,” the professors’ time was considered better spent on scientific study of ballads.49 Davis’ pride in organization and division of labor, and the characterization of fieldwork as mere labor that produces the materials for study, reflects an early twentieth century view of folklore study that positioned the field a science in order to differentiate it from the work of amateur collectors and enthusiasts.

When Arthur Kyle Davis characterized the university professors as “men of academic bent, little suited to work in the field,” he was also implying that those suited to fieldwork were those other than educated white men. White women, already educated in music and the arts, and already involved in reform work in their teaching duties, were the ideal fieldworkers for the Virginia Folklore Society. Around the same time that the

Virginia Folklore Society was recruiting teachers as ballad collectors, other supposedly scientific ventures were recruiting women as fieldworkers. Charles Davenport, the leader of the eugenics movement, placed a high value on “feminine tactfulness,” as an asset for fieldworkers interacting with “delinquents, the wayward, imbecile, the epileptic, the able in music, mechanics, art, indeed the vast majority of human traits, women, for the most

49 Ibid., 454. “A corps of trained workers must be developed which means that the original collector, like all good commanders in chief, will take less and less to the field, and become more and more an administrator and morale officer, a director or operations rather than an active fighter. The fact that the original inspirers of ballad collecting are so often men of academic bent, little suited to actual work in the field and with only a small fraction or time to devote to their work, makes even more imperative the finding of capable assistants as collectors. Success in this undertaking depends of the enthusiasm and administrative ability of the collector-in-chief.” Dye 32 part, are trained…”50 For tasks that involved interacting with others frequently, women were thought to excel.

The Virginia method was indeed effective. A few years after the Virginia Folklore

Society was established, Smith boasted that Virginia had collected more ballads than any other state folklore society, and a little over a decade after forming, the Virginia Folklore

Society proudly announced that they had collected fifty different ballads (plus many variations) and had collected ballads from all one hundred counties in the state. This success confirmed Smith’s assertion that Virginia was a hotbed of Child ballads, and also affirmed the success of their collecting method. Beginning in its 1918-1919 bulletin, the

Virginia Folklore Society credited teachers with its ballad collecting success. “We were the first to undertake this great work in Virginia and the first to undertake it anywhere through the teachers in the public schools. That Virginia has found and rescued more of these old-world treasures than any other single State is due more to the interest and perseverance and intelligence of the teachers than to any or all other causes.”51

This chart, comprised of information is pulled from the Virginia Folklore

Society’s annual bulletin, shows that in the years with the most active song collecting, the labor of collecting ballads was gendered, with women collectors largely outnumbering men. From 1913-1916, the years between the establishment of the Virginia Folklore

Society and America’s entrance into World War I, women collectors make up a majority of the society’s collectors, largely due to the collecting work done by normal school

50 Charles Davenport, quoted in Amy Sue Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: ‘Women’s Work” in Biology,” Social Studies of Science 27, no. 4 (August 1997): 636. The description of certain eugenics subjects as artistic yet imbecilic parallels early twentieth century views of Appalachian folk singers quite neatly. That both the folklore movement and the eugenics movement were focused on Appalachia is a connection I explore further in chapter two. 51 Virginia Folk-Lore Society, “Bulletin,” No. 6, 1918-1919. Dye 33 students at Farmville. Although folklore work died down during the war, when it picked up again in 1920, women again made up a substantial majority of the collectors. When the society began to wrap up its collecting efforts in the 1920s, they scaled down their collecting operations, sending one man, John Stone, on long expeditions to previously unexplored regions. In those years, the work done by women is not accurately represented by the number of collectors. In 1923, for example, when only two collectors contributed songs to the society, collector Alfreda Peel, the only woman to contribute, gave the society twenty-three out of the twenty-four songs received.

25

20

15

10

5

0

Women Men

Figure 2: Virginia Folklore Society collectors, by gender, 1914-1924. Virginia Folklore Society, Bulletin, Nos. 1-11, University of Virginia Special Collections Library.

Teaching, Women, and Music in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

Such a division is not surprising, given the feminization of the teaching profession at the time of collection. Teaching became to be associated with “women’s work” around the middle of the nineteenth century. Women were drawn to the teaching profession seeking autonomy, financial security, and moral rewards. Although teaching was highly Dye 34 associated with religious morality, beginning in the 1840s, teachers began using general humanitarian language to describe their work. Teaching also gave women the opportunity to gain autonomy, which was highly associated with travel in the nineteenth century. The influx of women into the teaching profession redefined the field. In the mid-nineteenth century, teaching began to be closely associated with the family: the school was a continuation of the home, and the teacher took on a motherly figure.52 Thus, in the mid- nineteenth century teaching was redefined to match existing definitions of women’s

“true” nature as mothers, and tasked white women in particular with rearing the next generation of citizens.53 As I will show in this section, teaching as a profession dominated by white women was associated with raising the next generation of strong citizens, performing charity work for less advantaged areas, and maintaining a white supremacist racial order. Additionally, I will show that music was an integral part of a woman’s education, particularly in training to become a teacher, in the nineteenth century, a tradition that carried into the twentieth and impacted the work that the Virginia schoolteachers did for the Virginia Folklore Society.

At the end of the nineteenth century, women sought out teacher’s colleges to advance their careers. Post-war white women—those born after 1849—began to go to school to gain preparation for careers as teachers.54 During this time, teaching itself was in the process of redefinition. As the United States underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization, teaching work was transformed from home to factory (more scientific and

52 Kathleen Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850-1950 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998), 12. 53 Ibid. 13. However, the conception of teachers as mothers, and teaching as fulfilling women’s true destinies was only applied to white middle-class women. 54 Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 170. Dye 35 professional), much like the “new woman” who was autonomous, educated, articulate, and employed.55 Schooling was a way to professionalize and homogenize the discipline.

Charles Duncan McIver began the campaign for public state normal schools in the South, arguing that the education of women was more important than the education of boys because educated mothers would be able to teach their children.56 Again, teaching was defined as an extension of motherhood, an aim that was reflected in the wide range of vocational instruction in domestic duties such as dressmaking, cooking, and housekeeping.57

In the South, an increasing public school system and a demand for teachers spurred the development of Normal Schools in many states, including Virginia. The first normal school to open its doors was a school for black men and women in Petersburg, which opened in 1882.58 Two years later, the State Female Normal School in Farmville,

VA opened its doors on October 30, 1884 as the State Normal School for White Women.59

In the early twentieth century, three more normal schools were established for white women; the Harrisonburg and Fredericksburg normal schools opened in 1908, followed by the opening of the Radford State Normal School in 1910. The normal schools were part of a larger education reform project aimed at rural areas, and teaching was marketed to women teachers as a community service project and a way to give back to the world, a

55 Weiler, Country Schoolwomen, 16. 56 Amy Thompson McCandless, The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth- Century American South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 21-22. 57 Ibid., 26. 58 Benjamin D Burks, “What Was Normal About Virginia’s Normal Schools: A History of Virginia’s State Normal Schools, 1882-1930” (PhD. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2002), 16. 59 Ibid., 81. Dye 36 strategy that would have appealed to women already engaged in community service through club work and campaigns.60

While a teaching job and an education from a state teacher’s college helped many women gain autonomy and financial independence, the establishment of the education institution was tied up in a white supremacist nationalist project, a history that carried into the twentieth century. The literacy tests for voting, established in the 1890s and aimed at disenfranchising black citizens, prompted a simultaneous interest in educating white Americans. Public education in particular was very important for ensuring white suffrage, and by extension, white supremacist power in America. 61 In the twentieth century, while African-American authors routinely made the reading list at women’s colleges, and rights for African Americans were hotly debated in writings and in school literary societies, the daily life at segregated normal schools and colleges for women reinforced white supremacist attitudes that ranged from paternalism towards hired black staff to overtly racist displays of blackface minstrelsy and support for the Ku Klux

Klan.62 The criticisms of women’s education too were connected to the race as much as they were to gender. In the white supremacist cause, white women could take the freedom they liked as long as their actions did not threaten the status quo of white supremacist patriarchy. As white women made political and social gains in other arenas, most notably in the suffrage campaign, white men began to scrutinize the feminization of the teaching profession with alarm. Some expressed concern that women could not

60 McCandless, The Past in the Present, 27–28. McCandless quotes Emma Louis Spieght, a graduate of North Carolina’s School for Women, who spoke of her duty to educate the rural Appalachians: “[h]e had us all so concerned over the number of adult illiterates that when I graduated I wanted to go to Buncombe County and teach the moonshiners. My mother was properly horrified at the prospect.” 61 McCandless, 22. 62 David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs, Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women’s Colleges, 1884-1945 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 121. Dye 37 properly educate America’s white sons, and feared a general feminization of American citizens. Criticism of white women teachers took a eugenics bent in the early twentieth century: hiring married white women was seen by some as taking them out of the home, thus rendering them unable to raise their own children, and contributing to the decline of the race.63

Music was a large part of the curriculum for the educated woman in the twentieth century, as it had been in the nineteenth. A Victorian girl’s education necessarily involved some form musical training, entrusting girls and women to bring music (and a sense of moral guidance associated with it) into their homes.64 As Ruth Solie has written, the “girl at the keyboard” became a nineteenth-century mythical figure based both in historical fact and in moral idealism. In the Victorian age, young girls were expected to dutifully practice the piano. This had a utilitarian value—fathers and brothers could unwind to music after a hard day’s work, and might be enticed to remain at home instead of unwinding at saloon—while also reinscribing mythic ideas of natural gender roles. At the piano, girls were framed as the sentimental, delicate, and moral counterpart to a man’s rationality, roughness and aggressiveness. As Solie writes, “during the course of the nineteenth century educational ‘reforms’ produced curricula that became in fact more sharply differentiated toward the rational/scientific for boys and the more emotional/aesthetic for girls.”65

63 Weiler, Country Schoolwomen, 24–25. 64 Solie, Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations. 65 Solie, 92. Dye 38

This expectation continued into the twentieth century, when women carried their domestic duties and their musical skills into the classroom when they became teachers.66

As musicologist Jewel A. Smith notes in a history of music in women’s seminary schools in the nineteenth century, music study came to be seen less as an “accomplishment” that upper-class white women might take on to amuse their families and guests at social gatherings and more as part of a rigorous education with many intellectual and moral benefits.67 Still a very gendered practice, music education came to be seen as a critical component of training a young teacher. Southern women’s colleges offered more musical opportunities than did their Northern counterparts or co-educational Southern institutions.68 The emphasis on music in Southern institutions for women was part of a larger pattern of the plantation ideas of proper race, gender, and class attitudes making their way into educational philosophies and practices in the South.

The Virginia Folklore Society’s enlistment of teachers as ballad collectors thus took place in the context of the race- and gender-segregated teaching profession, a profession which additionally emphasized a music education. The gendered and racial divisions inherent in the Virginia method had real consequences evident in the submitted ballads. Specifically, evidence of these divisions shows up in the type of songs submitted, and the musical transcriptions accompanying some submissions. In the following section,

I examine submissions and letters from Virginia schoolteachers who submitted ballads to the Virginia Folklore Society. I show that the schoolteachers brought an expressly

66 Gavin James Campbell, Music & the Making of a New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 19–20. 67 Jewel A. Smith, Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 26. 68 McCandless, The Past in the Present, 57. Dye 39 musical practice to their work, a practice consistent with the norms of early twentieth century white womanhood. The variety of their submissions, and their insistence on the value of transcribed tunes, meant that their work differed from that of the academics, who desired songs as artifacts of old England and Scotland and were interested in ballads as part of a lineage that could be traced back to antiquity rather than as a living performance practice. Letters from Virginia’s ballad collecting schoolteachers reveal the ways that educated white women valued and interpreted the songs being sung around them.

“Ballads can never live without music”: White Womanhood and Musical Transcription in

Song Collecting

At the turn of the century, academic interest in ballads was primarily a literary endeavor rather than a musical one. Folklore study in America was rooted in philology, a linguistic discipline that located the roots of contemporary culture in the etymology and grammar of classic texts. While classical philologists preferred Greek and Latin texts, language professors in the 1840s added English literature to the field. The academic study of ballads was born out of this disciplinary turn; old English literature was considered to represent the etymological and structural origins of the modern English language, and ballads the root of modern poetry. Such a turn was intrinsically bound up with nineteenth- century theories of racial classification; philologists promised to find a pure and isolated

Anglo-Saxon race by identifying the historical structures of the modern English language.

Although academic folklorists recognized ballads as musical objects, scholarly study of folk tunes failed to take root in the academy. Academics had difficulty classifying the folk ballads because they could not identify fundamental relationships Dye 40 between tune variants as easily as they could in textual variants.69 Olive Dame Campbell, who co-authored English Folk Songs of the Southern Mountains with English folklorist

Cecil Sharp, wrote an article in 1915 that addressed the problem with the lack of interest in the music of Appalachian ballads as compared to the words. Although acknowledging that oral transmission meant that ballad melodies would invariably be altered, Campbell argued that the “old minor scale” of the ballad melodies reflected their proximity to the music of old England, Scotland, and Ireland. Ultimately for Campbell, the music of the

Appalachian ballads expressed the “temper and isolation” of the mountain region, and she considered discussion of mountain ballads to be incomplete without a consideration of the music.70 Campbell’s appeal regarding “the old minor modes” resonates with the philological interest in folk songs as preserved links to an ancient tradition. Decades later, when academics sought to theorize the ballad tunes, they would focus on identifying modes that connected a tune to an English tradition. At the time of Campbell’s writing, however, most of those interested in the music of Appalachian ballads were those working outside of the academy.

In the early twentieth century academic folklore was a field comprised exclusively of men, while women, excluded from academic professionalism, most often carried out their educational work in social reform projects such as settlement schools.

Appalachian settlement schools were the rural cousins of city settlement schools, like

Hull House in Chicago, that provided spaces for middle- and upper-class university- educated women to live and work in the poorest city neighborhoods with the aim of

69 D.K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 327. 70 Olive Dame Campbell, “Songs and Ballads of the Southern Mountains,” The Survey 33 (October 1914): 371–74. Campbell’s name is incorrectly given as “Oliver” in the index. Dye 41 educating and uplifting residents.71 One of the most prominent examples of such work was Hindman Settlement School, founded in 1902 in Hindman, Knott County, Kentucky, by two white Northern clubwomen, Katherine Pettit and May Stone. Hindman Settlement

School provided a basic education for the rural residents of the Cumberland Mountains.

More importantly for this study, it aimed at social reform through preservation of folk culture and domestic arts.

Whereas academics were stymied by the music of ballads, such problems didn’t concern practitioners at settlement schools like Hindman. Ballads were a focal point in the Hindman curriculum; founder Katherine Pettit was an amateur ballad-collector who wrote down ballad lyrics in her diary and encouraged the preservation of the oral ballad tradition by incorporating singing into settlement school activities.72 Hindman students were taught ballads informally, singing them in dormitories, at parties, and at informal gatherings, until 1914 when music instruction became more formalized.73 Pettit’s method of preserving oral tradition through continued use in a settlement school education made settlement schools ideal collecting locations for collectors such as Olive Dame Campbell,

Loraine Wyman, Howard Brockway, Josephine McGill, Evelyn Kendrick Wells, Richard

Chase, Mary Wheeler, and Gladys Jameson.74

71 Films for the Humanities & Sciences (Firm), Films Media Group, and Team Sound & Vision Inc, The Women of Hull House, Harnessing Statistics for Progressive Reform (New York, N.Y.: Films Media Group, 2005). Daphne Spain argues in the film that treating the city as an extension of the home—keeping the city clean and healthy and considering the city community as a sort of family—gave women opportunities for social action they previously didn’t have. 72 Virginia Chambers, “The Hindman Settlement School and Its Music,” Journal of Research in Music Education 21, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 139. 73Chambers, 141. Chambers adds, “Teaching responsibilities of music teachers is not detailed, but the impression gained is that from 1914 through 1965 the music curriculum consisted entirely of singing.” 74 Of these collectors, McGill, Wyman, and Brockway published their collected ballads in piano songbooks aimed at a popular audience. Benjamin Filene characterizes this as a “move to link mountain music to the feminized realm of the home,” acknowledging women as the demographic most likely to buy piano books. Filene, Romancing the Folk, 19. Dye 42

The Virginia Folklore Society was a site where these two schools of thought were brought together. By enlisting the help of state schoolteachers, the Virginia Folklore

Society unwittingly invited in a host of ballad enthusiasts uninvested in the philological discipline. Instead, they gained informants who were interested in the music of the ballads, who knew how to perform and transcribe the tunes, and whose local knowledge of the Virginia mountains and their investment in social work and rural reform meant that they brought tunes to the attention of the Virginia Folklore Society founders that were well beyond the society’s original scope.

Alfreda Peel’s submitted notebook, which documents her first meeting with Texas

Gladden and fellow singer Sis Sears, captures the disparity between the collected songs and those desired by academic folklorists. Peel submitted fourteen songs in her

Schoolcraft notebook on November 6, 1916, but after her submission was reviewed by

Stringfellow Barr, only two were unequivocally identified as Child ballads, Fair Ellen

(Child #73) and Barbara Allen (Child #84). The rest were either discarded or withheld for further discussion. Barr’s notes to Peel’s submissions make it clear that the reviewer was judging the submission as a literary work, often discussing the plot of the stories; he wrote of “A Little Miss Down in the Garden,” “ballad-like in plot (the return of a trooper to his true love), but found wanting, and of “A Neat Young Lady,” he wrote, “in plot quite ballad-like, and fairly good in style, but on the whole not a true ballad.”75 Others, like a ballad called “Pearl Bryan” and another called, “An Orphan Girl,” were discarded without comment.

75 Stringfellow Barr, “Ballads Submitted by Miss A.M. Peel,” The Virginia Folklore Society Archive, Acc. #9936, Box 25, Folder 1. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. Charlottesville, VA. This archives collection will be abbreviated as VFS in further citations. Dye 43

Because of the emphasis on music in a young woman’s education, particularly during teacher training education, the Virginia Folklore Society’s “corps of trained workers” were very skilled musically. The schoolteachers, many of whom were musically trained themselves or had “musical friends,” made transcriptions of the songs they collected and argued for the importance of the music as well as the poetry. Juliet

Fauntleroy, an Altavista teacher who heard Alphonso Smith speak at a teacher’s convention, became one of the Virginia Folklore Society’s most prominent collectors, and one of its fiercest advocates for ballad tunes. A descendent of Col. Charles Lynch, the brother of Lynchburg founder John Lynch, Fauntleroy was a wealthy and well-educated woman from Altavista, Campbell County, Virginia. She was a graduate of Randolph-

Macon Woman’s College and was among the first women to matriculate at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University.76 Fauntleroy’s work with the Folklore Society would span decades, but it began on March 9, 1914, when she wrote to Smith after hearing him speak at the Educational Convention in Lynchburg the previous fall. “My attention having been called to ballad hunting, I have tried to discover any still handed down in my own immediate neighborhood—and with better results than I anticipated.”

Fauntleroy included ballads collected from Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Maxie and Mr. and Mrs.

Alonzo Hogan, all of Campbell County. She wrote that Mr. Maxie learned his songs from an aunt, “who had such a sweet voice that the neighbors often used to come in just to hear her sing,” Mrs. Maxie from her mother and older sisters, Mr. Hogan from his mother, and

Mrs. Hogan from her aunt. Fauntleroy’s ballad collecting was extensive; she had a friendly rivalry with Martha Davis regarding who could collect the most ballads, a battle

76 Emily Parrow, “The Ballad-Hunter: Juliet Fauntleroy and the Preservation of Virginia’s Folk Music,” Avoca House Museum, accessed February 8, 2020, http://www.avocamuseum.org/juliet-fauntleroy. Dye 44 that Fauntleroy ultimately won. This rivalry was encouraged by the Smith, who considered it, “very profitable for the Folk-Lore Society.”77

Throughout her tenure as a ballad collector, Fauntleroy would constantly call attention to the importance of the music of the ballad airs. In the post-script to her first letter to Smith, Fauntleroy was already keen to the music of the folk tunes. “I have also collected the tunes to which some of these ballads are sung. For the most part they are rather simple and monotonous. I wish information as to ballad melodies, and the notes, were more accessible.”78 A few months after her original submission, she wrote to Smith,

“I do hope you will publish all the airs you can find. Ballads can never live without music. Can you not induce other ballad collectors to write down the music also, or to get some musical friend to do it for them?”79

Fauntleroy was far from the only collector who saw the importance of the ballad tunes and offered musical transcriptions to the Virginia Folklore Society; the students at the normal schools where the VFS had established ballad clubs quickly decided to transcribe their collected tunes. In its second meeting, on March 26, 1913, the ballad club at Farmville Normal School decided to appoint a committee to preserve ballad tunes along with the verses.80 In the following month Miss Perkins, the head of the music department at the normal school, took charge of transcriptions.81 Collectors often revealed their musical ears and transcribing skills in letters they sent along with dictated

77 Arthur Kyle Davis, ed., Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1929), 34. 78 Juliet Fauntleroy to Alphonso Smith, 9 March 1914, Arthur Kyle Davis Papers, Box 10, Folder 5. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. University of Virginia Libraries. This collection will be abbreviated as AKD in further citations. 79 Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, 36. 80 “The Focus,” April 1913. 81 “The Focus,” May 1913. Dye 45 lyrics, as Martha Davis did in a 1916 letter to Smith: “I found he [a man from the mission] knew Lady Gay, so I asked him to come into the kitchen and sing it. He has a rich baritone, and he sang it well. It was like an echo from a past age. I wrote the air down at once in the same key in which he sang it. These old airs in a minor key are often so sad.”82 Collectors who did not know musical transcription themselves often relied on musical friends, who were in ready supply. Schoolteacher Corita Sloane of Fairfax

County sent in some ballads learned from her mother with an offer, “I could recall the tunes if you desire them and Miss Robertson says she will arrange the music if in your book form music can be planned for.”83

Some collectors may have become acquainted with Appalachian ballads through settlement work, or may have brought their knowledge of ballads to their settlement work. This may have been the case with Alfreda Peel, who did settlement work in

Roanoke County and also was one of the Virginia Folklore Society’s regular performers.84 She sang regularly at Virginia Folklore Society annual meetings from 1917 to 1923. In 1917, she sang “Barbara Allen,” and other ballads unnamed in the society’s bulletin. Peel sang for the society again in 1919, and must have been memorable because the bulletin noted her absence in following two annual meetings: “The absence of Miss

Alfreda Peel was much regretted by those who had heard her ballad singing at former meetings.”85 Smith recognized Peel’s singing in a letter to Page Bryan, the corresponding secretary for the Colonial Dames of America. When the Dames expressed interest in

82 Martha Davis to C. Alphonso Smith, 2 March, 1916. AKD, Box 10, Folder 4. Emphasis mine. 83 Corita Sloane to Alphonso Smith, 15 Feb., 1914. AKD, Box 10, Folder 1. 84 Alphonso Smith to Pearl Bryan, 7 Dec., 1920. AKD, Box 10, Folder 1. Smith mentions Peel’s settlement work but is unsure of whether or not Peel was still doing that work. I have not found any other mention of Peel’s work in settlement schools. 85 Virginia Folk-Lore Society, “Bulletin,” 1920. Dye 46 having ballads performed in a meeting on December 28, 1920, Smith recommended Peel for her accuracy in singing the ballads “as they are actually sung today in remote places in Virginia,” adding, “She sings these ballads very appealingly, and you will get a better idea of song literature in colonial times in Virginia from her singing than from any music that I could send you.”86 The schoolteachers thus brought musicality to the academics, moving the ballad study away from a philological practice. Still, as one can see in

Smith’s letter to Bryan, the academics were interested in the music as a link to old

England, and were not interested in current practice.

Traditional Ballads of Virginia included transcribed tunes for forty-four of the fifty-one ballads presented in the volume, although not all of the lyrical variations of each ballads were matched with a transcribed melody. The Virginia Folklore Society hired two women, Margaret Snowden Broomall of New York City and Betty Booker of

Charlottesville, as musical editors. The music was placed in a section that followed the poetry section, separated so that non-musical readers need not be burdened by the music.

Davis’ explanation, “the plan of segregation finally adopted at least clearly indicated for musical and non-musical readers their respective bailiwicks,” suggests that many readers disagreed with Fauntleroy and thought that ballads could very well live without music.87

Davis’ section on the music and its treatment in the introduction to Traditional

Ballads shows that Western musical notation often proved to be a problematic representation of the collected Virginia ballads. The editor’s primary concerns regarding the music was fitting lyrics to the tune and fitting the tunes into a standard meter. He

86 Alphonso Smith to Pearl Bryan, 7 Dec., 1920. AKD, Box 10, Folder 1. 87 Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, 20. Dye 47 wrote that singers often “arbitrarily” emphasized notes, “generally the weaker accents.”88

Thus it was difficult to determine whether to fit a sung melody into a meter that would accurately reflect the singer’s accents, or if the musical editor should alter the tune slightly in order to better fit it into a standard meter of Western notation. Although Davis wrote, “the ballad singer does not hesitate occasionally to cast timing to the wind and indulge in a long recitative on a single note,” the editors chose to write the melodies in a standard meter—most of the ballads are written in common time or 6/8 meter—often fitting multi-syllabic words under a single note in order to keep the meter. As none of the ballads appearing in Traditional Ballads of Virginia were recorded before the book’s publication, it is impossible to compare the transcriptions to the sung airs. Additionally, the transcribed tunes set in common meter became definitive versions of the ballads— many readers may have incorporated these melodies into their own repertoire, taking them as the definitive version of a song.

The musical editors seemed to accept alterations for the sake of the meter, and even acknowledged the shortcomings of transcription for capturing some elements, such as the singers’ “mountain whine,” which added to the charm of the performance but contributed nothing to the scientific study of ballads. They did not, however, accept any alterations in the form of musical accompaniments. The rejection of accompaniments is the clearest indicator of the division between the academic folklorists and those who collected ballads for performance. They considered accompaniments to be, “something which does not belong strictly belong to the ballad. It is an embellishment, designed to make the song available in convenient form to a larger public, in the musical home, or on

88 Davis, 18. Dye 48 the concert stage.”89 The acknowledgement of the musical home suggests that the

Virginia Folklore Society members were aware of piano books of ballad tunes that were being published at the time, and also of the concurrent interest in ballads in local music clubs.90 Both uses of ballads were popular with and marketed towards women, and the

Virginia Folklore Society’s firm rejection of musical accompaniment shows a desire on the part of the editors to clearly separate Traditional Ballads from the popular ballad editions. However, collectors were likely familiar with these editions and may have been collecting and transcribing ballads for performance, as seen in this letter from Arthur

Kyle Davis wrote to Alfreda Peel about one of her informants’ submitted transcription:

About Mrs. Seward’s notation there is some doubt. In the first place the bass accompaniment is unnecessary, all we want is the simple, accurate notation of the air. Her notation however, appears to me to be technically accurate, though it is not ‘modal.’ Probably Texas did not sing it in an older mode. There is, however, the bare possibility that Mrs. Seward, not being familiar with Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian and Ionian, may have failed to hear accurately certain notes of the modal scale. She should be familiar with the modes of folk music as explained in Sharp’s introduction to ‘English Folk-Songs From the Southern Appalachians’…91

Davis’ concerns reveal two large discrepancies between the aims and methods of the folklorists and those of the schoolteachers. The first, regarding Mrs. Seward’s addition of a bass accompaniment to the sung melody, shows the different values held regarding use of folk songs. Mrs. Seward had knowledge of thorough bass and an ability to compose

89 Davis, 19. 90 Filene, Romancing the Folk, 18–19. 91 Arthur Kyle Davis to Alfreda Peel, 24 Oct., 1934, AKD, Box 8, Folder 10. Dye 49 simple song accompaniment, a skill that she likely learned in school.92 In the home, schoolroom, and music club, solo singers or choral arrangements made up a large part of the performed repertoire, and a pianist with skill in improvising accompaniment to a sung air was a great asset. While hearing and transcribing the tune, it might have seemed natural for Seward to identify the underlying chord structure of the tune, and equally natural to compose a bass line to assist the pianist who might accompany a singer performing the tune in a parlor, classroom, or concert setting. Seward’s thorough bass notation suggests that she made her transcription with an intention to perform it, whereas

Davis and the academic were interested in notation for preservation and comparative purposes.

The second, regarding the accuracy of Seward’s notation, reflects the growing academic interest in musical modes as indicators of authentic English and Scottish ballads.93 As Seward’s transcribed melody did not fit neatly into one of the modes expected of the old ballads, Davis became suspicious of both the singer and the transcriber. He weighed the work of Cecil Sharp against the musician who had heard the tune firsthand, expecting that Seward might have actually heard the tune differently if her knowledge of Appalachian folk music came from Sharp’s study rather than first-hand experience. While there is no way to know for certain whether Seward’s transcription

92 Juanita Karpf’s survey of mid-nineteenth century American tune books helps us understand how musicians learned how to properly accompany a vocal score. Karpf notes that tune book editors arranged choral works in TASB setting rather than the standard SATB in order to give an accompanist an easy view of the main melodic line and the bass line. Figured bass was also taught and printed in instructional books to help accompanists learn the rules of harmony, and accompanists were encouraged to internalize the principles so well that they could “merely think” of the bass figures without needing the written on the page. Juanita Karpf, “‘In an Easy and Familiar Style:’ Music Education and Improvised Accompaniment Practices in the U.S., 1820-80,” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 32, no. 2 (2011): 122– 44. 93 Filene, Romancing the Folk, 20. Dye 50 accurately captured Texas Gladden’s sung melody, Davis’ hesitation reveals folklorists’ expectations for the music they found in the Appalachians as well as the limitations placed on their own study.

While the Virginia Folklore Society initially saw the schoolteachers as a “corps of trained workers,” a large workforce that would carry out the instructions of the academics at the university, it is abundantly clear in the submitted letters that the schoolteachers brought their own interpretations, values, and practices to their work. Almost immediately after taking on the task of collecting the poetry of Child’s English and

Scottish ballads in the Appalachian mountains, many schoolteachers and normal school students embarked on additional tasks of collecting African American folk music and transcribing the music of the songs they collected. While outside of the scope of academic interest in ballads, the work of the schoolteachers instead reflects the interests in folk music common to educated white women. The Virginia Folklore Society was thus a site where two white, upper-class streams of thought regarding folk music clashed: the musical-social work of educated white women was at odds with the philological work that interested English professors at the University of Virginia and the field of academic folklore at large. The Virginia Folklore Society largely resisted these new additions to their study, incorporating only the transcribed music in Traditional Ballads of Virginia, and even then, with caveats and no detailed study of the musical properties of

Appalachian ballads.

The divisions between the Virginia Folklore Society’s aims and the work of the collectors would not stand for long. In the 1930s, popular interest in Appalachian folk music, due in large part to several well-known folk festivals in the region, forced Dye 51 academic folklorists to grapple with the music as well as the poetry. Academic folklore began to reflect the interests of the ballad-collecting schoolteachers more than it reflected

Alphonso Smith’s. Shortly after publishing Traditional Ballads of Virginia, the Virginia

Folklore Society soon found their poetry-based collection wanting, as they simultaneously became embroiled in a rivalry with John Powell, Annabel Morris

Buchanan, and Winston Wilkinson, a team of folklorists involved in the popular White

Top Folk Music Festival in Southwest Virginia. At this time, transcription work became a priority for the Virginia Folklore Society, as they raced to record folk singers and document folk tunes ahead of “the Whitetoppers.” For the former, they relied on networks established by their corps of schoolteachers, primarily Juliet Fauntleroy and

Alfreda Peel. The collectors set out into the field to find their old informants and make new connections, and invited singers to their homes to record ballads. For the latter, the

Virginia Folklore Society worked with amateur musicians to make musical transcriptions for publication. I will conclude this chapter by briefly detailing what Alfreda Peel referred to as “The Battle of White Top,” and examining the important role that women played in transcribing folk tunes, doing fieldwork and making recordings for the Virginia

Folklore Society in a new era of folk song study.

“The Battle of White Top”: Transcription in the Fight for Virginia’s Folk Music

On December 13, 1933, Alfreda Peel wrote worriedly to Arthur Kyle Davis, “Did you see the Czar has been down getting all our singers from Patrick County, among them one of the two who sang for us in Radford?” She continued, “Now Wilkinson is coming to

Salem. I shall go and warn my singers. Texas has another addition to her already Dye 52 numerous family of nine. I hope it’s not called Annabel or John Powell.”94 Peel’s letter shows the contempt that she held towards John Powell, who she often referred to as “The

Czar,” Annabel Buchanan, who was alternately called “The Czarina” or “Circe,” and

Winston Wilkinson, a violinist who worked with Powell and Buchanan and was sometimes referred to in letters as “Rasputin Wilkinson.”

The letter also reveals the threat that the three folklorists posed to the Virginia

Folklore Society. Like the Virginia Folklore Society did in their early collecting years,

Powell, Buchanan, and Wilkinson were similarly travelling around Virginia in search of folk singers and old ballads. Rather than working together, the two factions of Virginia folklorists were enemies that Peel envisioned as opposing sides in World War I: the

Virginia Folklore Society “Western Front” defending themselves against invaders from the East. Although the Virginia Folklore Society had recently published Traditional

Ballads of Virginia, which should have established them as the authorities on Virginia folk music, the interests of the rival folklorists exposed a crucial gap in the Folklore

Society’s research—music. Powell, Buchanan, and Wilkinson’s interest in documenting the musical airs of Virginia folk song—not just the poetry of Virginia versions of Child’s

English and Scottish Popular ballads—pushed the Virginia Folklore Society into a new era of collecting that centered on the music. Again, they looked to the women who had aided them in their initial collecting efforts, this time pairing collectors like Juliet

Fauntleroy and Alfreda Peel with musicians and music educators who could transcribe folk tunes. Musical transcription, a practice that was once on the margins of the Virginia

Folklore Society’s work, now took center stage.

94 Alfreda Peel to Arthur Kyle Davis, December 13, 1933. AKD, Box 8, Folder 10. Dye 53

This section shows how the schoolteachers’ skills for transcription became increasingly valuable to the Virginia Folklore Society in the decade when the society made sound recordings of their collected folk songs. I also highlight the work of Alfreda

Peel to show the level of involvement this song-collecting schoolteacher had in her work of collecting songs, transcribing tunes, and advocating for an honest, non-exploitative representation of Virginia folk singers. She also had a close personal relationship with

VFS archivist Arthur Kyle Davis; in letters between the two Peel appears to be regarded as an equal peer. In the 1930s—the “Arthur Kyle Davis” era of the Virginia Folklore

Society—the Virginia Folklore Society arguably relied more on the skills of their “corps of trained workers,” and the voices of those workers gained increased prominence in the

Virginia Folklore Society’s work.

As a ballad collector, Alfreda Peel was described as “more adventurous, less sedentary,” than other ballad collectors, and narratives of her ballad hunting trips read like mythical adventure stories, strange encounters in which the ballad singers and collectors were equally foreign to one another. Domestic work, embodied practices of womanhood, served to bridge the gap. An account of the trip in which Peel discovered

“The Devil’s Nine Questions,” describes Peel and roommate Caroline Melbard, two

“strange town women […] mounted on two rough farm horses,” making their way through densely wooded roads and a rocky stream in order to reach the house of a

“singing woman.” When they reached the house and found the singer unwilling to sing for them, the women used their domestic skills as leverage, offering the singer housework in exchange for songs:

An old woman with a pet owl on her shoulder stood in the door-way of one of the shanties. She was a saw-mill cook Dye 54

whom we knew for a ‘singing woman’. […] We told her of our quest and asked her to sing for us. ‘I declare I ain’t got no time, fer I got to get my dishes washed.’ My friend volunteered to wash them, so after many excuses the old woman finally consented. […] So, accompanied by the owl which made strange noises, we sat on the porch while the rain dropped from the eaves and the storm rolled away over the mountains. Ballad after ballad she sang in her cracked and quavering voice, but still they were all familiar. ‘Do you know about the devil?’ I asked hopefully. ‘I kin sing one about the Devil an’ the Nine Questions’.95

Her first meeting with Gladden is documented in a Schoolcraft notebook containing fourteen ballads she sent in 1916 to Charles Alphonso Smith, a professor of English at the

University of Virginia and the Virginia Folklore Society’s first president and archivist. At the time, the schoolteacher’s impression of Gladden and her fellow singer, Sis Sears, was a mix of class-based stereotyping and an interest in literacy typical of folklorists in the early twentieth century; Peel wrote that Gladden and her fellow mountain singer Sis

Sears were “both typical mountaineers, and both wholly illiterate. They often amused their neighbors on long winter nights by singing these quaint songs.”96 Over the next few decades, however, the two women maintained personal and professional contact. Gladden was a reliable source of old ballads for the song collector, and Peel often acted as

Gladden’s manager. She shared tunes like “The Devil’s Nine Questions” with the singer, accompanied Gladden to folk festivals and singing competitions, and fiercely guarded her and her songs from other folklorists. Jim Gladden, Texas’s son, later referred to Peel as “a part of the family…who considered Mama on the same level as herself.”97

95 Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, 46–47. 96 Alfreda Peel to C. Alphonso Smith, 5 Nov, 1916. VFS, Box 25, Folder 1. 97 Stephen Wade, The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (University of Illinois Press, 2012). 261. Dye 55

Peel was a dedicated, accomplished ballad collector, but she was also one of the

Virginia Folklore Society’s biggest defenders when “the Whitetoppers” began to gain national recognition as Virginia’s leading folk scholars. The White Top Folk Festival, an annual outdoor music festival on White Top Mountain run by Annabel Morris Buchanan,

John Powell, and John Blakemore, who funded the event, was a cultural tour-de-force that redefined Virginia folk music in the popular and academic eye. Although it only ran though the 1930s, the White Top Folk Festival gained considerable attention, most notably with Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to the festival in 1933. White Top was one of many folk festivals established in the late 1920s and early 1930s; other popular festivals included Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Ashville, North

Carolina, Jean Thomas’ American Folk Song Festival in Ashland, Kentucky, and Sarah

Gertrude Knott’s National Folk Festival.98

The members of the Virginia Folklore Society considered Powell and Buchanan’s interest in ballad singers as encroaching on their territory and threatening their hold on

Virginia’s definitive folklore collection. Additionally, the Virginia Folklore Society members considered White Top to be an exploitative, showy representation of Virginia folk culture, one quite different from the scientific, scholarly work they saw themselves engaged in. Buchanan and Powell’s popularity and zeal for song collecting remained a source of anxiety for the Virginia Folklore Society. Alfreda Peel was particularly involved in this rivalry, and letters between her and Arthur Kyle Davis reveal the extent of Peel’s investment in the folk song collection effort and her loyalty to the Virginia

98 Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine, 185. Dye 56

Folklore Society. More than just a laborer collecting songs, Alfreda Peel was active in the fight over how and by whom Virginia folk songs were represented.

The Virginia Folklore Society’s effort to record Virginia folk singers in the 1930s was in part a reaction to the White Top Folk Festival and the collecting zeal of Powell,

Buchanan, and Wilkinson. When Alfreda Peel discovered singer Charles Lee of

Newcastle, she stressed the urgency with which the Virginia Folklore Society should record him. “I am very anxious for you to make records of him as he has, according to his estimate, one hundred and one ballads. As some of John Powell’s people have been on his trail I wanted us to get there first.”99 Alfreda Peel in particular sought to define her involvement with folk festivals in opposition to Buchanan’s, which she saw as self- serving and exploitative. Upon discovering a Fiddler’s Convention in Back Creek

Country, Peel wrote excitedly to Arthur Kyle Davis, “There is to be an old fiddler’s convention in Sis Sears’ country, untouched and unexploited by Annabel.”100 After attending and becoming involved in the convention, Peel was careful to distinguish her work from that of the White Top organizer, positioning herself as a better, less intrusive folklorist than Buchanan, who she saw as capitalizing on and exploiting the music of groups of people to which she did not belong. “In the first, I am only an invited guest, it is not my festival at all,” she wrote to Davis. “God forbid I should pose as Mrs.

Buchanan. It is gotten up ‘for the people, by the people’ of Back Creek and surrounding districts. I am gently assisting in a quiet way. A sort of encourager and adviser.”101

99 Alfreda Peel to Arthur Kyle Davis, 7 May, 1934, AKD, Box 8, Folder 10. 100 Ibid., 13 Aug., 1934. 101 Alfreda Peel to Arthur Kyle Davis, 8 Oct., 1932, AKD, Box 8, Folder 10. Dye 57

The White Top Folk Festival, with its growing popularity, became an obstacle for the Virginia Folklore Society members, who wanted to keep unpublished songs away from the ears of the festival organizers. Every year, Buchanan would send invites to

Arthur Kyle Davis and Alfreda Peel entreating them to attend, and every year they would think up excuses for not attending or plot a strategic attendance. In 1933, when Eleanor

Roosevelt was expected to attend White Top, two of the Virginia Folklore Society’s most valuable informants, Texas Gladden and Minter Grubb, were excited to perform at the festival for the first lady. This posed problems for the Virginia Folklore Society, which

Peel solved by attending alongside Gladden to ensure that the singer did not give any folk songs to Buchanan or Powell. Using military language Peel told Davis of her plan:

To explain why I was forced to take Texas. It was to save her from the enemy. She asked me and I agreed when I found she might go with a neighbor, then she would have gone unguarded into the Czar’s country. This way she is in cahoots with us and promises not to sing anything except what is now in your possession. Her family live near White Top and I feared foul play.102

A few days later, she wrote again to confirm: “Dr. McConnell and all of us are going, representing the Virginia Folklore Society. So the clans are gathering to your side for a raid into the enemies country […] I’ve got Texas under control and have saved her from the enemy.”103

The Virginia Folklore Society’s 1932 recording effort—in which they made the earliest recordings of many Virginia folk singers—was a part of the effort to stake their claim on Virginia folk scholarship. It was also a venture that relied heavily on the work

102 Alfreda Peel to Arthur Kyle Davis, 31 July, 1933, AKD, Box 8, Folder 10. 103 Alfreda Peel to Arthur Kyle Davis, 6 Aug., 1933, AKD, Box 8, Folder 10. Dye 58 and the skills that schoolteachers had brough to the Virginia Folklore Society for decades.

In August of 1932, the Virginia Folklore Society made a trip with a record-cutting machine to record the singers that Peel, Fauntleroy, and a few others had located. They made recordings at Alfreda Peel’s house in Salem, Juliet Fauntleroy’s home “Avoca” in

Altavista, Annabel Buchanan’s home in Marion, and the State Teacher’s College in

Radford, collecting the voices of thirty-nine singers singing one hundred and eighty-one songs, most of which were English ballads, reflecting the slant of Traditional Ballads of

Virginia.104 In 1934, the Virginia Folklore Society was engaged in an effort to transcribe the tunes recorded in the 1932 trip and make transcriptions of tunes discovered in new field trips. Just as they did in their early collecting days, the Virginia Folklore Society

“co-opted the necessary technical musical ability” from amateur musicians to make transcriptions of all of the music found in the field, and, like the schoolteachers who worked as ballad collectors, many of these musicians were women. Accurate transcribing skills, plus to ability to travel to remote areas of Virginia that did not have electricity, often made the Virginia Folklore Society’s musical women more valuable than the recording machine the society borrowed to make recordings.

Alfreda Peel worked closely with Kathleen Coxe, a local pianist, and Juliet

Fauntleroy worked in collaboration with Eunice Cheatham, a Campbell County homemaker with an accomplished musical background. Cheatham received a certificate in theory of music and piano and theory of music and singing from Randolph Macon

104 It remains unclear to me why, given such a contentious rivalry between the “Whitetoppers” and the Virginia Folklore Society, the Virginia Folklore Society recorded at Annabel Buchanan’s house. In letters, Buchanan often references the tension between the two groups, often expressing confusion and never directly stating what might be the root cause of the tension. Letters in the Virginia Folklore Society archive have so far not been able to explain this leg of the recording trip. Dye 59

College in 1913, and became an instructor of voice at the college from 1921-1924.105 She was a soloist at the first Baptist Church in Lynchburg from 1918, and was an artist member of the Virginia Federation of Music Clubs recognized for her singing and songwriting abilities.106 Together, Cheatham and Fauntleroy tracked down singers known to Fauntleroy, with Cheatham eagerly writing down tunes. The pair were part of the

Virginia Folklore Society’s larger effort to collect and record the tunes of Virginia’s folk music, and they were not the only pair of women trekking through the mountains. In a letter explaining Cheatham’s duties, Arthur Kyle Davis wrotes, “Your collaboration with

Miss Fauntleroy in Campbell County will be similar to the collaboration in Roanoke of

Miss Alfreda Peel with Mrs. Whitwell Coxe [Kathleen Kelly] who, like yourself, is an expert musician with a highly trained ear. Both of you are helping greatly towards the compiling and recording of our folk tunes. I wish my record machine could write tunes as well as record them.”107

Eunice Cheatham’s exacting work and her musical skills are evident in a notebook of songs sung by Ellen Pribble, a Campbell County singer identified in Virginia Folklore

Society materials as “Mrs. Kit Williamson.” In a neat hand, Cheatham transcribed thirty- four tunes in two green blank music books made by the J.P. Bell Company of Lynchburg, accompanying each with personal notes. Many are noted simply with the mode of the tune—for example, “The Farmer’s Curst Wife” which Cheatham notes is “Heptatonic

Mode I”—but on others, Cheatham wrote own her personal opinions. She added “this is,

105 Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Register of Graduates and Former Students, 1896-1931, (Lynchburg, VA: Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, 1932), 13. 106 Scrapbook of the Virginia Federation of Music Clubs, 1927-1929. Annabel Morris Buchanan Papers, Series 5, Folder V-4020/S-1. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries. Chapel Hill, NC. 107 Arthur Kyle Davis to Eunice Cheatham, April 2, 1934. AKD, Box 6. Dye 60 to me, a charming tune,” on the page of “The Sailor Boy,” and on the page of “Mary’s

Blessings,” noted variations in the way Mrs. Williamson sang the tune from one performance to other. For example, the singer sometimes began the song firmly on a C# rather than sliding up to it from the lower A as Cheatham had notated. In the letter accompanying the notebooks, Cheatham mused on the quality of her tunes compared to well-known versions, and also expressed the joy she had transcribing the tunes.

Mrs. Williamson’s tune to ‘Mary’s Blessings’ is in my estimation a far finer tune than Cecil Sharp’s tune for the same words and her tune for ‘The Two Sisters’ is the most charming I have heard for that ballad.

There are several ballad tunes and folk tunes among the ones I am sending that I think and hope you will find quite interesting.

I wrote these thirty-four tunes in three half-days and never had so much fun in my life. I am so interested in the preservation of the folk-music of Virginia and if I can be of any service to you, I shall be glad to help all that I can.108

A few days later, Cheatham followed up with another letter that contained a correction for “Mary’s Blessings.” Her new transcription “steadying the rhythm somewhat” drew out the melody, making one measure into two and replacing the sixteenth notes and quarter notes that dotted her original transcription with notes of longer value. Cheatham added, “This tune is my particular pet and while I want them all accurate, this one I want especially to have written to convey it exactly as Ms. Williamson sang it to me.”109

Although the Virginia Folklore Society’s collecting aims changed during their first two decades, their reliance on women remained the same. In the initial collecting

108 Cheatham to Davis, March 25, 1934. VFS, Box 24. 109 Cheatham to Davis, March 28, 1934. VFS, Box 24. Dye 61 efforts, women schoolteachers’ made for ideal ballad collectors due to their proximity to potential informants and their connection to the statewide education system, whose infrastructure could be used to spread the Folklore Society’s message. The women schoolteachers brought new perspectives to their work, with musical transcription being one that the folklore society adopted and published in their first volume, Traditional

Ballads of Virginia. When popular and academic attention turned to the music of folk songs in the 1930s, it was transcription that would drive the Virginia Folklore Society’s collecting efforts. Again, women were of vital importance. The Virginia Folklore

Society’s reach into women’s networks then extended from the classroom to the music club to find capable musicians to transcribe recordings and informants in the field. Some of these women—prominent collectors like Alfreda Peel and Juliet Fauntleroy—have received attention in Virginia Folklore Society publications and folklore histories—but the large majority of the women who worked for the Virginia Folklore Society are simply named as collectors in Traditional Ballad of Virginia, and no academic study has looked in depth at the Virginia Folklore Society’s collaboration with the education system of the state.110

While barred from the academy and held in lower esteem than the professors who ran the Virginia Folklore Society, the women schoolteachers still held considerable status as white educated women, and I have attempted to make that distinction clear here whenever necessary. The gendered division of labor of the “Virginia method” still operated entirely within the sphere of whiteness, even if the Virginia Folklore Society

110 Alfreda Peel is mentioned in a chapter on Texas Gladden in Wade, The Beautiful Music All Around Us. Juliet Fauntleroy’s home, “Avoca,” has been turned into a museum, and her profile on their website details her work as folk song collector and teacher. See Parrow, “The Ballad-Hunter.” Dye 62 members were not openly committed to eugenics and white supremacy like John Powell and Annabel Buchanan. The narrow focus on English and Scottish ballads meant that the

Virginia Folklore Society deliberately isolated their study from other types of folk music currently being collected and studied in Virginia. There is no evidence in the Virginia

Folklore Society archives of correspondence with officials from the Hampton Institute, a historically black university that had been engaged in collecting black folklore since the latter decades of the nineteenth century.111 The Virginia Folklore Society also kept their labor force white by restricting ballad clubs only to several white normal schools. Indeed, while some informants were African American—the race of these informants was named, while the race of other presumably white informants was omitted—the large majority of collectors and informants for the Virginia Folklore Society were white. I have thus framed the practices of the Virginia Folklore Society’s ballad collecting schoolteachers as practices of educated white womanhood in an attempt to be accurate and not attribute practices I observed in the work of the collectors, such as rural education reform, skill in musical transcription, and a paternalizing view of black racial uplift, to women in general. Although some of these may have been practiced by black Virginia women as well, the subjects of this chapter likely gained their skills and knowledge through systems of white womanhood, such as an upbringing within their white homes and their education in race- and gender-segregated institutions.

The effectiveness of race and gender segregation within Virginia institutions in the early twentieth century essentially provided the Virginia Folklore Society with a well-

111 For more on the Hampton Institute and their folklore project, see Shirley Moody-Turner, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation, Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013). Dye 63 established network through which to enlist ballad collectors. We can thus observe the influence of white women’s work and professional networks in the archived collection of an institution to which they only peripherally belonged. We can also observe the tensions between the Virginia Folklore Society’s philological project and the views of the women who collected their ballads, many of whom saw the ballads as musical works whose lyrics could not be divorced from their melodies. The interpretations of the schoolteachers would ultimately align with folk song scholarship to come, evidence of which can already be seen in the “Battle of White Top” I described above. Attention to the music of Appalachian folk song would soon grab the academy in a similar manner and with similar aims as the philological study of ballads had. White women’s social organizations would be at the center of this venture as well.

Dye 64

Chapter 2: “Make America Truly Musical”: Anglo-American Folk Song and White Nationalism in Women’s Music Clubs

On October 1, 1934, Annabel Morris Buchanan addressed a music club in Beckley, West

Virginia, with a pressing question. “How may we, through our clubs or individually, contribute to the musical life of the community, state, and nation,” she asked, “and do our part in making America musical?” Chronicling the state of American folk song research, and the influence of folk life and folk music on the “great creators,” Buchanan urged the members of the Beckley music club to make use of their “native resources” by supporting small ensembles, choral groups, and “worth while” native artists, while building and maintaining opportunities for folk music research through collecting folk songs, organizing folk music programs or festivals, and teaching folk music in public school curricula. “The club has a definite responsibility in the life of the community, through club, civic, church, school, home, or other local undertakings,” she argued, “and in the life of the state or nation through participation in state or national undertakings.” This effort, she maintained, would not only be personally fulfilling but would “help in raising the cultural standards of our race to the highest level.”112 It’s worth dwelling on her final rousing rallying cry, which she repeated in similar speeches at other music clubs, encouraging them to get involved with collecting and performing folk songs. Largely the domain of wealthy white women like Buchanan, music clubs exerted a strong influence on local education and culture, with national music club organizations promoting their work as patriotic and nation-building in the early decades of the twentieth century.

112 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Our Responsibility Toward Making America Musical” (Speech, Beckley, W.Va, October 1, 1934), Series A, Folder 124, Annabel Morris Buchanan Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC. Emphasis mine. This collection will be abbreviated as AMB in further citations. Dye 65

In this day of altered values it is sometimes difficult to know what is fine and worth while. When we as individuals and as clubs look about us and begin to appraise the value of our native possessions—the folk heritage that has been ours for centuries, the native talent we posses, and the channels through which it may be developed—to know, love, and build upon them,—then, and only then will we make our greatest contribution to the cultural development of our community, our state, and our nation; and then only will we succeed in making America truly musical.113

Buchanan’s patriotic urge to aid the state and the nation through the community reflects

Americans’ new perception of themselves as a global superpower that emerged in the aftermath of WWI. The phrase “this day of altered values” could refer to the rise of the commercial music industry, the increase of folkloric interest in African American music, or just a general sense of unease and anxiety felt by America’s white genteel class. Like other wealthy white folks at the time, clubwomen felt deep anxiety about societal changes, worried that wealth, political power, and social status were slipping away from them, and welcomed any chance to assert white cultural dominance. Virginia’s Racial

Integrity Act, which made “race-mixing” illegal, had been in effect for ten years by the time Buchanan gave this speech, and an amendment that defined as black any person with “one drop” of African ancestry had been law for four.114 Twenty-five days after

Buchanan’s talk, a young black man named Claude Neal would be lynched by a white mob in Florida, and the federal anti-lynching bill created in response to this brutal act would ultimately fail in the Senate.115 To the members of the Beckley music club,

113 Ibid. 114 Brendan Wolfe, “Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930),” in Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities, November 4, 2015), https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/racial_integrity_laws_of_the_1920s#start_entry. 115 Robert L. Zangrando, “The NAACP and a Federal Antilynching Bill, 1934-1940,” The Journal of Negro History 50, no. 2 (1965): 110. Dye 66

Buchanan’s message would be clear: forces from within and without threaten white music and the white nation, and clubwomen could do their part to save it. By digging into their racial heritage via collecting, interpreting, and performing Anglo-American folk music, these white clubwomen could make America musical again.

Annabel Morris Buchanan worked to establish Anglo-American folk modes as the basis for new American compositions through her own compositions and her involvement in women’s music clubs. During her most active years, she had a passionate, tumultuous working relationship with the white supremacist folklorist, pianist, and composer John Powell, who established Anglo-Saxon clubs in Virginia and authored the

1924 Racial Integrity Act. This chapter argues that Buchanan’s arrangements of

Appalachian folk tunes and her work with women’s music organizations represent a

“polite,” feminine white supremacist practice that served as a cultural artistic foil to contemporary laws codifying eugenics, segregation, and ethnonationalism. Using

Annabel Morris Buchanan’s papers, housed in the Southern Historical Collection at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I reveal Buchanan’s decades-long, concentrated effort to establish an American musical style centered on the perceived sounds of Anglo-Saxon whiteness. I also show that women’s music clubs welcomed these ideas, eager to promote the Americanness of their women composers in a bid for recognition and prestige on a global stage. This work is in line with that of scholars who investigate music’s subtle, insidious political power. It adds a racial perspective to existing work on women’s music clubs and adds a gendered perspective to histories of

American eugenics. Buchanan’s work with folk music was part of the cultural arm of the Dye 67 eugenics movement, and the nationalist aims of women’s music clubs at the time provided the perfect venue to showcase it.

About Annabel

Annabel Morris Buchanan was born Annie Bell Morris in Groesbeck, Texas on October

22, 1888. She was the child of two middle-class working parents; her mother, Anna

Virginia Foster Morris, was a teacher, and her father, William Carruthers Morris, was the editor and publisher of a local newspaper who transitioned to becoming a minister at the

Cumberland Presbyterian church in 1901. From an early age, the young Annie Bell showed an interest in music, and received a music education that both reflected this interest and the socioeconomic standing of her family. She received a scholarship to the

Landon Conservatory in Dallas when she was fifteen, and studied piano, voice, violin, and composition, graduating with honors in 1906. After graduating and turning eighteen,

Annie Bell officially changed her name to the more glamourous Annabel. She taught music from 1907-1908 at Halsell College in Oklahoma, and then at Stonewall Jackson

Institute in Abingdon, Virginia, in 1909. She met Virginia lawyer John Preston Buchanan during that time, and married him on August 14, 1912, settling in Marion, Virginia, to start a family soon after.116 Annabel described herself as “temperamental, impulsive, optimistic” in a letter to Jay Murio, the editor of Music News, on January 21, 1930. In archived letters, Annabel comes off as personable and talkative; her letters are usually several pages long, filling up all edges of the page, and full of dramatic musings, self- deprecating jokes, and effusive praise for the recipient. Her body of work as a composer,

116 Lyn A Wolz, “Buchanan, Annabel Morris,” in Dictionary of Virginia Biography, ed. Sara B. Bearss et al., vol. 2 (Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 2001), 363. Dye 68 organizer, educator, and writer is similarly abundant. One gets the sense of an ambitious, motivated person who was always on the move, seeking out connections and embarking on new projects.

Annabel Morris Buchanan’s work co-organizing the White Top Folk Festival on

White Top Mountain in Southwest Virginia is the aspect of her folk music work most thoroughly explored in scholarly literature. Founded in 1931 by Buchanan, John Powell, and Abingdon, Virginia, attorney John Blakemore, White Top was one of several large folk festivals founded between 1928-1934. Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit in 1933 brought close to twenty thousand people to the mountain festival and was one of the highlights of

White Top’s history. A public folk festival, David Whisnant argues, offered advantages that scholarly volumes could not, namely, bringing folk music to a wider audience.

Festival organizers also positioned themselves against “citified” recordings of folk tunes, billing themselves as the authentic versions of popular Victrola records.117 The White

Top organizers made a concerted effort to steer their programming away from fiddling contests, thus avoiding any association with popular “hillbilly” records, and encouraged programming that aimed to draw a direct connection between the Appalachian mountains and Elizabethan (read: Anglo-Saxon) England. They had a special interest in ballad singers, upping the number of ballad singers from two to twenty-two in White Top’s second year, and included sword-and-morris dances—which were not a part of

Appalachian folk culture but rather purely English culture—in the program. Annabel

Morris Buchanan was heavily involved in establishing and organizing the White Top

117 Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine, 185. Dye 69

Folk Festival. She remained a festival organizer until her husband’s death in 1936, after which she ceased participation and moved to Richmond.

However, White Top was far from Annabel Buchanan’s only work with folk music. She also taught classes, gave talks, and wrote several books on the subject. In

1938 she published Folk Hymns of America, which explored the traditional use of secular tunes for sacred songs. Folk Hymns was full of notated music, reflecting the author’s musical training, and was well received by both musicians and scholars. She held a position as Professor of Music Theory at the University of Richmond in the 1939 school year where she taught a course on Anglo-American Folk Music and Balladry. In a letter to Mr. George Fischer, December 1, 1939, Buchanan wrote proudly: “I believe mine is the only such course being given in America.”118 On September 13 of that same year, she spoke at a meeting of the first International Congress of the American Musicological

Society, in New York, on her theory of a “neutral mode” in Anglo-American folk music.119 From 1934 and through the 1960’s, Buchanan tried unsuccessfully to publish

White Top Folk Trails, an expansive multi-volume work reflective of her own collecting work and her many years of correspondence with folk scholars about the history and theory of American folk music. Two other works, The Bough is Given to Me, and

Mountain Magic, also remain unpublished.120

Annabel Buchanan explored her interest in folk music through her involvement in women’s music clubs. Throughout her life she was a member of various women’s

118 Annabel Morris Buchanan to George Fischer, December 1, 1939, Series A, Folder 19, AMB. 119 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Modal and Melodic Structure in Anglo-American Folk Music: A Neutral Mode,” Papers Read by Members of the American Musicological Society at the Annual Meeting, 1939, 84– 111.; “Program of the International Congress of the American Musicological Society” (Conference Program, New York, NY, September 11, 1939), Series A, Folder 133, AMB. 120 Buchanan’s unpublished manuscripts are held in the Annabel Morris Buchanan Papers, in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Dye 70 music clubs, and at times held leadership positions within them. In 1923 she organized a

“Costume Recital of Folk Music” and had a program of “American Folk Music” at the

Monday Afternoon Music Club in Marion.121 She organized a program of folk music at the Virginia State Choral Festival in 1928. From 1929-1930, Buchanan was the president of the Virginia Federation of Music Clubs, where she used her position to advocate for more music education in rural Virginia homes and schoolrooms. She was a member of the composer’s group of the League of American Pen Women and had some of her compositions performed at group-sponsored concerts.122 Later in her life, Annabel

Buchanan successfully petitioned the National Federation of Music Clubs, a group with which she’d had several prior associations, to start an archive of American folk music, and she worked as the national folk music archivist from 1958-1963.123

Although trained in composition, Buchanan found little success in her early career. Like many other women composers, opportunities for publication were few and far between, and her works were subjected to intense judgement by publishing companies. A rejection letter from Edward Schuberth and Co., from June 23, 1919, was particularly harsh. Breaking the company rule of abstaining from providing criticisms to rejections, the editors of Edward Schuberth and Co. of New York wrote, “the compositions returned to-day are not interesting enough for those who can master its difficulties,” adding that, “They are outwardly showy with too little soul.”124 Buchanan’s vocal setting appears to be the major culprit, as the editors wrote, “The pianist has a chance to display his art, but your manuscripts are songs.” To other publishers,

121 Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine, 187. 122 Wilson Kimber, “Women Composers at the White House,” 486. 123 Wolz, “Buchanan, Annabel Morris,” 364. 124 Schuberth and Co. to Annabel Morris Buchanan, June 23, 1919, Series A, Folder 1, AMB. Dye 71

Buchanan’s chosen genre was a problem. Rejecting two manuscripts for two song settings—"Pine Trees and the Sky,” and “My Love A Lily Gave,”—The John Church

Company wrote from New York on June 18, 1919, “Frankly, Miss Buchanan, we have published so many songs of this type—the American Classic—that we do not want to add any more to our catalogue. […] We want to get away from it.”125 Instead, the John

Church Company wanted to emulate the success of Boosey, Chappell, and Ricordi publishers, and put out “the melodious English ballad type of song […] the type that is wholesome and good and much liked by young women students and music lovers in the home.” Rejections such as these show the intense desire of publishing houses to cater to a market of amateur women musicians, and also the popularity of English ballad settings in the home and schoolroom around this time. “Perhaps sometime you will try your hand at writing something of this sort,” the editors at John Church Company wrote, foreshadowing her later compositional successes. With incentive from publishing companies based on the purchasing power of young women, song collecting may have seemed like a lucrative venture for a young woman composer.

Buchanan came to define her compositional output through her use of Anglo-

American folk song modes in her choral settings of folk songs and other poetry. Much of the folk songs Buchanan set for chorus or for solo voice and piano would be songs she had personally collected while directing the White Top Folk Festival. Buchanan’s folk- inspired compositions were not always literal settings; she also used folk modes in her

“art music” compositions. For Buchanan, the compositional use of what she referred to as

“Anglo-American” or “Anglo-Saxon” folk modes had an explicit aim; to create a national

125 John Church Company to Annabel Morris Buchanan, June 19, 1919, Series A, Folder 1, AMB. Dye 72

American music based on America’s folkloric ties to old England. Unlike contemporary composers creating symphonic works based on American Indian and African American folk melodies, Buchanan, along with her White Top co-director John Powell, sought to establish American orchestral and choral music as a continuation of a white folk song tradition by composing in the modes of English ballads found in the Appalachian mountains.

Appalachian Folk Songs and Eugenics

Buchanan’s effort to establish “Anglo-Saxon”/Anglo-American” folk modes as the basis of American composition was part of a eugenicist type of folklore scholarship, like that of George Pullen Jackson, invested in establishing Anglo-Saxonism as America’s mythic folk heritage. Such studies coincided with the codification of eugenic Racial Integrity

Laws that enforced segregation, criminalized inter-racial marriage, and attempted to sterilize all of the “defectives” out of the “pure Anglo-Saxons” thought to be hiding out in the Appalachian mountains. Buchanan’s work in this particular endeavor found a home on the programs of women’s music club concerts, notably those of the League of

American Pen Women and the National Federation of Music Clubs, as part of the clubs’ efforts to promote American composers. Her work stands as an uncomfortable reminder of the cozy relationship white women and white women’s organizations had with overt white supremacy and the often-blurry boundaries between American folk nationalism and white nationalism. Drawing primarily from Buchanan’s speeches and classroom curricula, this section examines a distinctly white supremacist thread running through her folk music work, and draws ties between her work, the fascist folklore work of George Dye 73

Pullen Jackson, and the American eugenics movement of which Buchanan’s mentor, pianist John Powell, was a leading figure.

Throughout her life and work, Annabel Morris Buchanan maintained unwavering white supremacist vision of American folk music, one that she taught and promoted at every opportunity. Along with her White Top co-founder, John Powell, Buchanan advocated for a new American music based in the modes of the supposedly “pure Anglo-

Saxon” folk in the Appalachian mountains. The eugenics movement, centered in

Virginia, created legal definitions of whiteness, excluding all but “pure” Anglo-Saxon citizens from claiming whiteness and thus receiving full legal rights of person. It simultaneously whittled down the white population to those considered “fit” by legalizing compulsory sterilization of patients, many those same “Anglo-Saxon” mountain folk, in

Virginia’s many asylums. Similarly, Buchanan and Powell, urged white American composers to define themselves and base their musical output on their English heritage, exemplified by Appalachian folk ballads. They also urged composers to refine the folk songs into art music, using the folk modes, the purest essence of the folk ballads, as the basis for new compositions. In doing so, Buchanan and Powell drew a cultural through- line from Anglo-Saxon folk singers to American concert halls, envisioning a nation that reverberated with the voices of a pure-blooded white race.

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Virginia’s elite whites launched a violent political and social campaign to maintain the purity of their culture and their bloodlines that had devastating and lingering effects on all those deemed “colored,” or not white. Under eugenic laws like Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited interracial marriage and procreation, and was amended in 1930 to include the infamous Dye 74

“one-drop” rule, which declared that a person could not legally be recognized as white and claim all of the legal and social benefits of whiteness if they had even “one drop” of

African ancestry.126 The 1927 Supreme Court Case, Buck v. Bell, legalized compulsory sterilization for “defectives” and “imbeciles,” people who were thought to poison genetic bloodlines with their physical and moral failings. Places like the Virginia Colony for

Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia, which sterilized Buck v. Bell defendant Carrie Buck against her will, now had free reign to deny their patients, many of whom were poor mountain whites, the chance to have children.127

At the same time, Appalachian mountaineers and their cultural ties to old England received renewed interest by scholars and elites. While being systematically driven from their homes for the creation of the Shenandoah National Park and sterilized en masse in hospitals and asylums, Appalachian mountain folk were being celebrated as “almost pure

Anglo-Saxon stock” who might be redeemed if only they could return to “civilized” society.128 Their redemption potential was largely recognized by their cultural and musical ties to England. The long-discredited study Hollow Folk, written by science writer Thomas R. Henry and sociologist Mandel Sherman in 1932, framed five communities living in the mountainous area that is now Shenandoah National Park as

126 J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 87–88. The so-called “Pocahontas Exception” was the exception to the one-drop rule, designed to maintain the legal whiteness of descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, who remained among Virginia’s elite families. The Pocahontas exception stated that persons, “who have less than one sixty-fourth of the blood of an American Indian and have no other non- Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.” 127 Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, 1st ed. (New York : Knopf, 1985), 110–11. Kevles addresses eugenics over time, ending with a consideration of the lingering effects of eugenics philosophy and laws. 128 Mandel Sherman and Thomas R. Henry, Hollow Folk (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell company, 1933), 1. Dye 75

“present five stages of culture.”129 Criglersville (called “Briarsville” in the book), an unincorporated community in Madison County, Virginia, where Mandel Sherman lived, was described as the highest level of social development—with newspapers, schools, and

“all the common American games”—while Corbin Hollow (called “Colvin” in the book), nestled under Old Rag Mountain, represented the most “backward” community. The authors wrote that the children of Corbin Hollow, “had never seen the flag or heard of the

Lord’s Prayer,” and noted that nearly all Corbin Hollow residents were related to one another by blood.130 George Freeman Pollock, the owner of the Skyland Resort in

Shenandoah, used the study to argue for developing Shenandoah National Park and removing the families living on that land.131

Scholars framed the mountain folks’ musical ties to old England as evidence of their bloodlines and an argument for the preservation of their culture. Such a framing can be seen in Hollow Folk, which, in addition to its judgements on the un-Americanness of the mountain folk, is also a collection of old ballads. In Weakley Hollow, called

“Oakton” in the book, the authors find to their delight ballad singers who remember old

English tunes. Verses of the ballads “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellen,” “Pretty Polly,”

“Lovely Mary,” “Barbara Allen,” “The Wealthy Young Squire,” “Fair Charming Bright,” and “A Sailor’s Life,” as well as Civil War tune “Brother Green,” are documented in the

“Music” chapter of Hollow Folk.132 Like many folklorists at the time, Henry and

Sherman considered these old songs to be treasures languishing in the mountains, in

129 Sue Eisenfeld, Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 46. 130 Eisenfeld, 47. 131 Eisenfeld, 48. 132 Sherman and Henry, Hollow Folk, 138. Dye 76 danger of extinction. “With the passing of the elders of the present generation,” they wrote, “the remnants of the old English balladry which persist in this hollow probably will be forgotten.”133 Like the Anglo-Saxon bloodlines of the mountaineers, ballads were prized because they directly connected old England to present-day America. Books like

Hollow Folk make clear that eugenic interest in the culture and heritage of the mountaineers was coupled with a disinterest in the welfare of the people themselves.

John Powell, Buchanan’s co-director at White Top and her mentor for all things folk music, was on both the political and the cultural fronts of the eugenics movement. In speeches, Powell argued for social segregation and expressed anxiety about the crumbling barriers separating black and white people.134 Virginia historian J. Douglas

Smith considers Powell a “rigid extremist” who “desperately sought increasingly rigid laws to shore up the foundation of white supremacy.”135 Powell, along with self- proclaimed explorer and ethnographer Earnest Sevier Cox, formed the Anglo-Saxon

Clubs of Virginia in Richmond in September 1922. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs, the upper- class foil to the Ku Klux Klan, appealed to Virginia’s elite whites, who closely guarded the coveted bloodlines leading back to Virginia’s “first families.”136 In February 1924,

Powell and supporters of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs presented a draft to the Virginia

General Assembly of what became Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. This legislation criminalized lying about one’s race on legal documents, mandated race on birth certificates and marriage certificates, and prohibited marriage between white persons and anyone with any non-white genealogy. Although ostensibly concerned with

133 Sherman and Henry, 158. 134 Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 88. 135 Smith, 77. 136 Smith, 77. Dye 77 miscegenation, Powell and the Anglo-Saxon Clubs were actually concerned with interracial cooperation.

In multiple speeches at music clubs and folk music programs, Annabel Morris

Buchanan used fear of the loss of English balladry to stress the importance of white composers using English folk tunes as the basis for their musical creativity. Through new composition, she argued, Americans could keep the English ballad alive and well in the modern era. “No composer or musician can express his best ideas without being permeated with thorough knowledge and love for that which has been racially his for centuries,” she told the Marion Music Club on October 16, 1933.137 She stressed that taking inspiration from folk songs was not a casual practice, but one that required the composer to identify deeply with their racial heritage. “All of this interest goes deeper than merely using a folktune or ballad in creative writing,” she told a crowd at the

Southside VA 4-H Club Folklore Festival in Petersburg, Virginia on May 13, 1939 in a talk titled “Virginia Folk Arts and Their Value.” “It means knowing the thoughts, feelings, emotions, or our race so well that they become a part of us, influencing our creative work and our actions consciously or [un]consciously.”138 In these talks,

Buchanan could be nearly certain that she’d be speaking to an audience of white people, most often white women of a similar social standing as herself. Although Petersburg has long had a majority African American population, Buchanan’s use of “our race” makes clear that her audience was either completely or majority white. Elsewhere, Buchanan made it clear that she was speaking directly to white Americans. In a letter to the editors

137 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Talk for Marion Music Club” (Marion, Virginia, October 16, 1933), Series A, Folder 124, AMB. 138 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Virginia Folk Arts and Their Value” (Speech, Petersburg, Va, May 13, 1939), Series A, Folder 125, AMB. Dye 78 of the Musical Courier on June 5, 1932, Buchanan wrote that she had already seen, “the beneficial effect of our Anglo-Saxon folk music study on young composers of that race.”139

Often, Buchanan framed this sort of expression as something explicitly beneficial to the state and the nation. Her vision for the nation, however, was one that rejected modern technology and sought the “real” in the natural and folk world. Like many educated bourgeoisie in the early twentieth century, Buchanan seems to regard the modern world as one of dissociation, weakness, and sterility.140 This sense of anti- modernism lead many to look to folk music as a sort of salvation. In a folk program for the Institute of Rural Affairs at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia, on August 7, 1934, Buchanan’s speech notes mention that Virginia was beginning to discover “a treasure house of forgotten tunes and modes for our composers to build on,” and include a plea to get away from “machine life” and back to “simplicity,” “to have the courage to be ourselves; in so doing, help Virginia to be more truly and magnificently herself.”141 Such an urge reflects the desires of Virginia’s elite to find their identity in a romanticized past where the white moneyed class lived in peace, free from the threats of modernity and racial integration. Buchanan envisioned a national music that reflected the centrality of white Americans. “A national music will arise in America,” she wrote in a letter to a Mr. Howard in February 1938. “Despite our many nationalities, our basic stock is from the English-speaking race.”142

139 Annabel Morris Buchanan to Editor of The Musical Courier, June 5, 1932, Series A, Folder 4, AMB. 140 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5. 141 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Folk Program for Institute of Rural Affairs, V.P.I., Blacksburg, Va.” (Speech notes, Blacksburg, Va., August 2, 1934), Series A, Folder 124, AMB. Emphasis is Buchanan’s own. 142 Annabel Morris Buchanan to Mr. Howard, Letter, February 1938, AMB. Dye 79

In a speech titled “English-American Folk Song and its Value in Composition,” presented at a Washington D.C. folk program in January 1934, Buchanan made clear that incorporating English folk modes into compositions had national importance, as folk music “has become the expression of the race, not of one person; and thereby reflects the thoughts and feelings, the emotions of the race, as the spontaneous national utterance.”143

She concluded her talk with a powerful statement tying the use of folk modes to

American nationalism: “No composer can be international until he has first been true to his own race and deeply, sincerely national,” she told the crowd, adding a phrase that she said often in various forms, “No composer can rise to his highest heights except through long process of self development, based on thorough knowledge of that which has been his for centuries.”144 Her efforts on this front were noticed by George Pullen Jackson, who wrote to Buchanan in 1933 thanking her for “warm[ing] the hundreds who are still composing in the dark, and the thousands who are still ‘revealing’ to Americans the folk music of every other nation but their own.”145

Buchanan took these ideas into the classroom, as is evident in her Anglo-

American Folk Music and Balladry course at the University of Richmond, which she taught for one school year in 1939-1940. An exam sheet dated Jan 19, 1940 includes very leading questions that reflect the folklorist’s privileging of English and Scottish ballads, and the scorn shown to commercial hillbilly and country records. “Do the more modern

American types (as ‘hillbilly’, cowboy, etc.),” one question asked, “seem to you as

143 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “English-American Folk-Song and Its Value in Composition” (Speech, Washington, D.C, January 1934), Series A, Folder 124, AMB. 144 Ibid. 145 George Pullen Jackson to Annabel Morris Buchanan, August 31, 1933, Series B, Folder 331, AMB. Dye 80 valuable as the older tradition, in education, culture and creative art?”146 Notes on several student answers reveal that Buchanan was teaching the theories about race and antiquity that she and John Powell brought to their White Top work. According to Buchanan’s notes, Phyllis Coghill, a student in the class, wrote that “older trad. folksongs more valuable, probably because they were more distinctively of one race, and more representative, thusly, of a people.”147 Josephine Moncure, another student, wrote that

“Indian, negro, and Anglo-Am. are completely distinct types, expressions of the most fundamentally different races.” Moncure’s analysis also added a value judgement to the different types of American folk song, creating a hierarchy in which English folk song reigned supreme. “Indian more domestic, concerned mostly with nature and hunting, negro, generally spiritual,” she wrote. “Anglo Am. superior on the whole, because of its modes, [indistinguishable], historical context, and material.”148 Buchanan’s gradebook shows that Coghill and Moncure earned the highest grades in the class.149

Buchanan’s work follows a practice of using folk music as a tool for exclusion, specifically regarding English folk culture and white nationalist visions.

Ethnomusicologist Ross Cole has recently written about fascist ideology in folk music of

English folklorist Cecil Sharp. Cole defines fascism, in line with political scientist Zeev

Sternhell, as a confluence of “support for nonrevolutionary authoritarian socialism and militant organic nationalism, antipathy toward liberal democracy, and fascination with social Darwinism.”150 Sharp, Cole writes, took a dictatorial stance regarding his role as a

146 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Exam” (January 19, 1940), Series A, Folder 131, AMB. 147 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Exam Notes” (n.d 1940), Series A, Folder 131, AMB. 148 Ibid. 149 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Gradebook” (n.d 1940), Series A, Folder 131, AMB. 150 Ross Cole, “On the Politics of Folk Song Theory in Edwardian England,” Ethnomusicology 63, no. 1 (2019): 33. Dye 81 folk song authority, creating an institutionalized and highly curated canon of materials and using the press and public speaking engagements to promote himself as what the

London Folklore Society’s honorary secretary Lucy Broadwood called, “King of the whole movement.”151 Sharp’s authoritarian tendencies were combined with a white supremacist vision of the folk, most evident when he visited America. In the Appalachian

Mountains, Sharp found “the England of his dreams,” according to Maud Karpeles, and only collected from white singers ignoring black singers and their musical influence on whites.152 Most importantly, the folk song and dance revival in England had the express aim of creating a unified nation, populated by patriots whose shared folk culture and history was rooted in an imagined Edwardian England. The fantastical element of folk song collection—creating a narrative about a nation’s folk history that is then superimposed onto the practitioners from whom the folklorist collects—is a fascist practice that turns musicians and artists into playthings with which to construct the folklorist’s imagined, exclusive world. “Sharp’s gatekeeping actions,” Cole writes,

“transform[ed] vernacular practices into reproducible artifacts untethered from their original histories of meaning and use and repurposed for the sake of forging a new national socialist consciousness.”153

Sharp’s fascistic style of folklore work was not unique to Sharp or to England; indeed, folklore was commonly used to define national boundaries or to dictate a homogenous national identity and folk lineage.154 In early twentieth America, this fascist

151 Cole, 29. 152 Cole, 30. 153 Cole, 36. 154 For Germany’s efforts to create “a unified text that would be a musical simulacrum for national identity,” and the use of folk song in the efforts to expand German borders during the Third Reich, see Philip Bohlman, “Landscape—Region—Nation—Reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Dye 82 folkloric practice was excitedly furthered by scholars like George Pullen Jackson, a professor of German at Vanderbilt University who became interested in white spirituals, primarily large group singing like the sacred harp tradition.155 Jackson’s fascistic work in

American folklore sought to erase any traces of blackness in American folk music, attempting to prove white origins for all beloved black spirituals. In the 5th Edition of

Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Jackson wrote, “A close scrutiny of the black man’s collected songs and their careful comparison of those of the far earlier [i.e., white] tradition showed about half of them to be variants, either in tune or words or both, of definite songs in the white man’s stock.”156 His 1933 publication, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, boasted twenty “legitimate white song-ancestors of as many Negro spirituals.”157 Jackson even felt the need to link the music of Stephen Foster, the composer famous for his minstrel tunes, to white origins, lest listeners think the composer had drawn from black sources. In a 1936 article titled, “Stephen Foster’s Debt to

American Folk-Song,” Jackson tied Foster’s well-known tune “Old Folks at Home” to the Celtic folk songs “Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms,” “Annie

Identity,” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Maxine Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 106. 155 Richard Jackson, “Jackson, George Pullen,” Grove Music Online, 2001, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e- 0000014025. 156 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 8:11, in Dena J. Epstein, “A White Origin for the Black Spiritual? An Invalid Theory and How It Grew,” American Music 1, no. 2 (1983): 58. Epstein has called attention to the endurance of theories of white ownership of black folk songs, and has leveled an argument against these theories. She notes that theories of white parentage rely on analysis of notated music, ignoring sonic qualities and performance practice that reflect African and African-American influence. “The analysis of notated versions of black spirituals, as of other kinds of folk music, no matter how skillfully done, cannot answer questions of priority or establish the direction of historical influence. Parallels between white and black spirituals certainly exist, but they must be considered together with other kinds of evidence, stylistic, historical, iconographic, and ethnomusicological from Europe, Africa, and the Americas to reach valid conclusions. Any theory of folk music that ignores the sound of the music and how it is performed cannot be valid.” 157 George Pullen Jackson, “Stephen Foster’s Debt to American Folk-Song,” The Musical Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1936): n.1. Dye 83

Laurie,” “Last Rose of Summer,” and “O Shrive Me, Father,” due to the similarities in the melodic contours of the opening phrase, and suggested that “Old Folks,” as well as later Foster tunes including “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” were members of the Celtic tune family.158 To Jackson, black tunes could only be American if they had white parents.

Buchanan agreed with Jackson’s conclusions. In a letter to a Mrs. Haviland, she wrote:

“The negro spirituals are often derived directly from the white spirituals: the negroes learning them, naturally, from their white masters. Some may have come from other sources; they are often greatly changed, the negro forming an entirely distinct, and sometimes more beautiful (sometimes not so beautiful) spiritual out of the white form.”159

The fascist ideology driving Jackson’s work is evident in a paper given at the

1939 International Congress of the American Musicological Society, where he spoke on a panel with Annabel Morris Buchanan and identified “enemies” of folk music in America.

The greatest threat, Jackson claimed, was the “enemy within,” the American citizens who had not discovered the folk within themselves and either were ignorant of their folk history or gave it “that modicum of mild and superficial interest which one is accorded to a thousand other matters which are extraneous to one’s real self.”160 Buchanan’s efforts to get American composers to discover themselves through learning Anglo-American folk songs is exactly in line with Jackson’s words at the AMS conference. These folklorists were convinced that American identity was Anglo-Saxon identity, and anyone who claimed otherwise was ignorant or deluded.

158 Jackson, 159. 159 Annabel Morris Buchanan to Mrs. Haviland, February 3, 1939, Series A, Folder 17, AMB. 160 George Pullen Jackson, “Some Enemies of Folk-Music in America,” Papers Read by Members of the American Musicological Society at the Annual Meeting, 1939, 79. Dye 84

Anglo-Saxon Folk Modes, and their Uses in New American Composition

Musical composition provided exciting new ways for eugenicist folklorists to carry an

Anglo-Saxon tradition into the modern era. Through new compositions drawing from old folk songs, Anglo-Saxon heritage could be showcased in America’s music halls, homes, and classrooms. In this section, I focus on efforts by Annabel Buchanan and John Powell to refine Anglo-American folk songs to their barest essence, the modal scale. In academic talks, and in her own compositions, Buchanan would advocate for composers to use the folk modes in their composition as an integral part of embodying their Anglo-Saxon folk heritage. Additionally, I highlight the difference between “folk” and “art” music here as a eugenic one that echoed legislation legalizing compulsory sterilization. New art compositions based on Anglo-folk tunes would better represent the modern interests and musical culture of America’s elite and middle-classes rather than the interests and traditions of the rural mountain folk, who were considered “unfit” for modern society. As a composer, Annabel Buchanan positioned herself as someone able to take the best of

Anglo-American folk culture and utilize it in a way that would be safe and familiar for a music club audience.

John Powell, Annabel Buchanan’s White Top co-organizer and mentor for folk music work, expressed his white supremacist extremism in his musical compositions through creative use of structure and symbolic motives. Arguing that “our only hope for a nation in America lies in grafting the stock of our culture on the Anglo-Saxon root,”

Powell depicted white supremacy and the threat of rhythmic, bodily blackness in two large-scale symphonic works. Rhapsodie nègre, Powell’s 1918 concert jazz work, Dye 85 incorporates “tom tom” rhythms, a dance motive representing a “the frantic frenzy of a

Voodoo orgy,” and excerpts from the African American spiritual “Swing Low Sweet

Chariot.” Throughout the work is a constant battle between melody (as a symbol of whiteness) and rhythm (a symbol of blackness), symbolizing the black body as an uncontrollable force which cannot be civilized.161 Musicologist Stephanie Doktor has placed the work within “primitivist modernism,” an art movement that depicted the so- called “savagery” of African cultures as excessive and Romantic in contrast to structured

Western industrialism.162 Powell’s later work, Symphony in A (1951), attempted to use the modes of Anglo-Saxon folk songs as the basis of a large scale symphonic work, but ultimately failed to establish the modes as a new musical language for American symphonic works. Musicologist J. Lester Feder writes that the pianist created “a pidgin of his ‘modal’ language and tonality, switching uncomfortably between them in discrete musical segments.”163 Powell’s artistic work does show that eugenics was, at its core, a class-based movement, interested in preserving the social, political and economic power held by wealthy white Americans by co-opting the remnants of English culture from the rural poor into more elite modes of cultural expression.

Buchanan may have been Powell’s most eager student, bringing the folk mode idea into her academic, social, and compositional worlds. Buchanan was an enthusiastic proponent of using the supposedly Anglo-Saxon folk modes as the base of her settings of folk songs and poetry. She used the modes in her own compositions, spoke at many

161 J. Lester Feder, “Unequal Temperament: The Somatic Acoustics of Racial Difference in the Symphonic Music of John Powell,” Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 1 (2008): 31–40. Feder’s musicological analysis of Powell’s symphonic works are too extensive to be adequately summarized in this present work, but are essential to those interested in the nuances of Powell and Buchanan’s racialized compositions. 162 Stephanie Doktor, “‘The Jazz Problem’: How U.S. Composers Grappled With the Sounds of Blackness, 1917-1925” (Doctoral Dissertation, Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia, 2016), 84. 163 Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 42–43. Dye 86 music clubs encouraging clubwomen to do the same, and presented a modal theory at a major international musicological conference. Buchanan interacted not only with John

Powell, but also with George Pullen Jackson, who once wrote to Buchanan congratulating her on finding the white origins of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” in her book Folk Hymns of America.164 Annabel Morris Buchanan’s folk song work is reflective of the deep investment of wealthy white women in cultural white supremacy. The

Women’s Racial Integrity Club in Richmond, for example, had at least forty members in

1926, some of whom were music club women who knew John Powell through his influence in Richmond music circles.165 While Buchanan was never a member of any explicitly white supremacist organizations, she nevertheless maintained a commitment to cultural white supremacy through her own musical creativity and her influential standing within women’s music club organizations.

Buchanan’s understanding of folk music and its potential for American composition was permeated by a eugenic impulse to purify and refine. While Anglo-

American folk music was established as the basis for any white composer, Buchanan and her associates emphasized the need to separate the “pure” from the “crude” and praised the efforts to “refine” vernacular folk traditions by turning them into art music. In a radio address titled “Our Cultural Heritage,” for CBC radio in Asheville, N.C., and

Spartanburg, S.C., in 1941, Buchanan addressed concerns about the value of “cheap and vulgar” tunes and texts in American education and creative work. In the address, she displays a eugenic impulse to discard, to refine, and to only let the best specimens survive:

164 George Pullen Jackson to Annabel Morris Buchanan, May 9, 1938, Series B, Folder 331, AMB. 165 Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 85. Dye 87

In building upon our cultural heritage we learn first to distinguish the fine from the mediocre folk productions. We learn to shape our musical composition from the beautiful melodic patterns, and to employ the ancient folk modes with modern forms. We learn to be true to nature, to our own race, to ourselves. We learn simplicity and faithfulness to high standards. We learn the basic impulses of the race, whether good or evil, and how to treat them in art form. We learn to discard vulgarity, over-writing, sentimentality, verbosity—none of these are found in folk music or balladry. None but truth can survive.166

Buchanan put this philosophy into practice in her own musical compositions and arrangements, which will be discussed further below. Her efforts were applauded by

Lewis Henry Horton, head of the music department at Morehead State Teachers College in Morehead, Kentucky. Congratulating her on her fine arrangements of “Anglo-Saxon folk tunes,” Horton wrote to Buchanan on November 23, 1933, distinguishing

Buchanan’s art from its source. “But the most interesting thing to us,” he wrote, “is that you are preserving the best of these tunes while having no fear to give them a truly artistic dress.” Horton continued, “We have little patience with the fetish of preserving these things in their historic simplicity. Presented as they are by the average native they have little but historic significance. Refined with a technique such as yours they become works of art.”167 Statements like those of Buchanan and Horton echo the sentiments of eugenicists who sought to “lift up” the white race by strengthening the power of the white elite while sterilizing the poor and “feeble-minded.” The language of “discarding” and

“refining” used by Buchanan and Horton make it clear that artistic arrangements of folk

166 “Our Cultural Heritage” (Asheville and Spartanburg, NC: CBC, July 31, 1941), Series A, Folder 125, AMB. 167 Lewis Henry Horton to Annabel Morris Buchanan, Letter, November 23, 1933, Series A, Folder 6, AMB. Emphasis mine. Dye 88 songs represented to them the height of the Anglo-Saxon sound better than the original collected songs.

For a composer seeking to discover the essence of English folk music in order to align with a race-based musical lineage, modal theory provided a path forward. An understanding of the folk modes could provide composers with a way to use the sounds of English folk music without replicating folk performance practices. Annabel Morris

Buchanan was deeply invested in this sort of study and spoke about it in a talk titled

“Modal and Melodic Structure in Anglo-American Folk Music: A Neutral Mode,” which she gave at the First International Congress of the American Musicological Society in

1939. In this talk she introduced her “neutral mode,” a variation on the Dorian mode with a “neutral” third (a quarter-tone falling between the major and minor third) and a seventh that varied between major and minor. “I have long felt the need of a neutral mode for accurate classification of the neutral 3rds and varying 7ths that constantly recur in our

Anglo-American folk music, especially in the Appalachians,” she told the audience.168

Buchanan discovered the neutral third, she recounted, when recording a version of “On

Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand,” from a “Primitive Baptist elder” in the Cumberland mountains of Tennessee. Confused as to the mode, Buchanan sang the song back to the singer, first with major thirds, then with minor, then with “quasi-neutral” thirds. Upon hearing the third version, the singer exclaimed, “That’s it, that’s it, sister! The only thing needful is a leetle more dynamite behind the voice!”169

168 Buchanan, “Modal and Melodic Structure in Anglo-American Folk Music,” 88. 169 Buchanan, 94. Dye 89

Figure 3: Engraving of the"neutral mode" from Buchanan, “Modal and Melodic Structure in Anglo-American Folk Music.” The asterisks refer to the "neutral" notes, which lie between half-tones.

Modal scales fit neatly into Buchanan’s genealogical, eugenicist view of musical traditions. “The modes have been in process of evolution for many centuries,” she exclaimed during her talk. She posited an evolution from pentatonic mode to hexatonic and finally to “full” octave scale, noting that when Appalachian singers sang songs in pentatonic modes that were “found elsewhere with full scale,” this was likely because

“the singers have not entirely emerged from the pentatonic stage of musical development.”170 The neutral mode, Buchanan posited, while perhaps not the single

“racial scale” that Cecil Sharp posited for English folk songs, was “a very early and prevailing mode of the folk,” as she claimed to recognize it in American Indian, African, and African American folk melodies as well.171 At once ancient and evolved, the neutral mode was the perfect eugenic vessel, a strong foundation from which to build new

American music.172 The neutral mode never appears in Buchanan’s own compositions, perhaps in part because the neutral third could not be played on the piano, the preferred

170 Buchanan, 86. 171 Buchanan, 91. 172 Buchanan, 84. “In the present revival of interest in folk-ways, our American composers are experimenting more and more with their native music as a foundation for creative art. But this experimentation will lead nowhere unless the basic modal and melodic structure of our folk melodies is concerned.” Dye 90 accompaniment for the solo and choral pieces performed in classrooms and local music clubs. However, Buchanan consistently used modal scales as the basis for her folk song arrangements and original compositions.

At Home in Women’s Music Clubs

Annabel Buchanan found a welcome audience for her work in women’s musical organizations throughout the nation, using her position as president of the Virginia

Federation of Music Clubs to push folk music research and using her membership in national composer’s clubs to get her pieces performed. Buchanan’s work fit in with nationalist aims of women’s music clubs, who often promoted the Americanness of their members and their music in an attempt to draw a wide audience. In the following section,

I examine Annabel Morris Buchanan’s folk music work as it relates specifically to her leadership positions with women’s music clubs and the compositions she created for their stages, focusing on a set of compositions commissioned by the National Federation of

Music Clubs for use in their 1941 biennial. I argue that although outwardly engaged in efforts promoting the diversity of American folk music, women’s music club organizations enthusiastically welcomed eugenicist folk music work like Annabel’s.

Through their involvement with music clubs, American women supported concert organizations and exercised considerable influence over programming decisions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the number of women’s amateur music clubs multiplied dramatically, and clubwomen came to be considered as the “cultivators” of musical taste and musical life in their communities.173 Women’s influence in the arts

173 Whitesitt, “Women as ‘Keepers of Culture’: Music Clubs, Community Concert Series, and Symphony Orchestras,” 66. Dye 91 extended to concert programming as well; the interest of large audiences of women could dictate the success or failure of certain artists or pieces in the American orchestral repertoire. An example of this is the Seidl Society, a women-only music club founded by

Laura Holloway in 1889, and later run by Laura Langford.174 Created to support the work of conductor Anton Seidl, the Seidl Society brought “Wagner Nights” to Brighton Beach in New York’s Coney Island. This concert series not only brought symphonic music to a new audience, but also reflected the desires of the women of the Seidl Society, who had a passionate response to the music and the setting, screamed during performances and, as

Joseph Horowitz writes, “were excited in ways their husbands could neither understand nor displace.”175 Perhaps the strongest indicator of women’s organized involvement in

American concert music was the reaction from men. Responding to an increasing anxiety about music’s “feminization,” men framed their patronization of music concerts in the masculine language of “city building,” or claimed that their wives had dragged them to the theater.176 From the programming to the concert itself, women and their music clubs asserted substantial power and influence.

Women’s efforts in American concert life were often framed as a nationalist practice; in encouraging and influencing music programming, club women claimed, they were contributing to the life and development of the nation.177 As historian Karen Blair has written, clubwomen adopted American nationalist rhetoric after losing respect for

European composers during World War I. They launched an effort called “Hear America

174 Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191–92. 175 Horowitz, 215. 176 Campbell, Music & the Making of a New South, 17. 177 Amy Beach, qtd. in, Linda Whitesitt, “The Role of Women Impresarios in American Concert Life, 1871-1933,” American Music 7, no. 2 (1989): 162. “I can not express too strongly my belief in the value of women’s clubs as a factor of development of our country.” Dye 92

First,” which, among other things, advocated for the professional and creative success of

American composers and musicians.178 Later, clubwomen would use nationalist rhetoric specifically to promote the music of their members. As Marion Wilson Kimber has recently shown, during the Depression, women’s music clubs stressed the Americanness of their members, in part to capitalize on an increasing populism in classical music but also to distract from pernicious myths of women’s lack of musical creativity. Clubwoman and composer Phyllis Fergus, when promoting concerts by the Composer’s Group of the

National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW, of which Annabel Morris

Buchanan was a member), urged music lovers to “Buy American,” and consider their patronage of clubwomen’s concerts as an investment in the cultural and economic strength of the nation.179

The collection, preservation, and dissemination of American folk music was another key aspect of the “Hear America First” campaign. Organizations like the General

Federation of Women’s Clubs promoted classical and folk music in educational and social settings.180 Clubwomen’s interest in folk music was diverse: The National

Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC) invited ethnomusicologists like Alice Fletcher,

Natalie Curtis, and Frances Densmore to speak about American Indian folk music, and others presented on “Negro” folk music.181 Clubwomen also circulated songbooks and bibliographies practically covering the entire gamut of American folk music: Blair has listed American Indian music, African-American songs, patriotic songs, hymns, popular

Stephen Foster tunes, occupational tunes like those of cowboys, miners, sailors,

178 Blair, The Torchbearers, 57. 179 Wilson Kimber, “Women Composers at the White House,” 484. 180 Blair, The Torchbearers, 45. 181 Blair, 62. Dye 93 lumberjacks, as well as regional tunes like those of French Creoles, Kentucky mountaineers, and Southwestern Hispanics, along with many old English ballads.182 The

NFMC’s biennial conventions hosted many lectures on activities the clubwomen were engaged in, among them were lectures on collecting folk songs.183

As President of the Virginia Federation of Music Clubs, a position she held for two years in 1929 and 1930, Annabel Buchanan maintained that music clubs were the solution to a dreadful music situation in the state. She wrote an article titled “Is Virginia

Giving Her People Good Music?” in which she argued that the state should “develop” mountain music into a educational musical curriculum as a way to simultaneously provide musical training for Virginia’s schoolchildren and connect them to their folk heritage. This effort, she argued, would particularly help church choruses reconnect themselves to a higher power. The racial implications were heavy: “Largely due to the wave of jazz revival songs which has swept the country,” she argued, “the music in many churches of Virginia, as in other states, is steadily deteriorating.” She also implied that the nasal mountain singing style might be trained out: “Let our music clubs establish county and inter-county public school choral contests, and hear for themselves the strident, nasal tones called ‘singing’.” In order to combat these two threats to Virginia musicality, Buchanan argued, the federation of music clubs needed to work collectively to establish a folk festival, many choral contests, and a rigorous music curriculum to be instituted in all Virginia schools.184

182 Blair, 63. 183 Blair, 51. 184 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Is Virginia Giving Her People Good Music?” (n.d.), Series C, Folder 378, AMB. Dye 94

Annabel Morris Buchanan’ folk song arrangements and modal compositions represent a synthesis of clubwomen’s dual aims of supporting American women composers and promoting American folk music, but with a distinct racial exclusionary frame. At a 1933 NLAPW concert in Chicago, organized by Fergus, a choir performed

Buchanan’s Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies. Wilson Kimber notes that Buchanan’s piece was the only “possible exception” to a program of which little was deliberately

“American.”185 Buchanan was not alone in this endeavor, however. Her fellow member of the NLAPW Composer’s Group, Amy Beach, began composing music using quotations from folk songs of the British Isles in 1892.186 Like Buchanan, Beach was part of the turn of the century composer’s movement that sought to define an American music using folk themes. Soon, Beach began looking to the American Indian for source material, composing Eskimos, op. 63 in 1906, based on tunes from Franz Boas’ monograph The Central Eskimo, and From Blackbird Hills: An Omaha Tribal Dance, op.

83, in 1922.187 Both pieces were piano pieces intended for children, reflecting clubwomen’s desire to use folk music in educational settings. Unlike Beach, who looked to Scottish, Irish, Balkan, African-American, and American Indian music when defining an American sound, Annabel Morris Buchanan limited her vision to Anglo-American songs, largely in response to efforts like Beach’s.188 In a 1940 Guggenheim Award application, Buchanan made her position clear, writing, “Although our roots are

European, our environment and traditions have so far been disregarded, or not yet

185 Wilson Kimber, “Women Composers at the White House,” 486. 186 Adrienne Fried Block, “Amy Beach’s Music on Native American Themes,” American Music 8, no. 2 (1990): 149. 187 Block, 150. 188 Block, 141. Dye 95 understood, by our composers. Europeanism, atonalism, folk music, classics, jazz, materialism — all these have in turn exerted influence; resulting in musical self- consciousness rather than the sureness of self-knowledge which can come only through knowing our individual and racial heritage.”189 Buchanan’s works are thus an explicit rejection of American multiculturalism and a plea for white composers to create music that represented the longevity and continuation of the white race.

The pieces Buchanan composed for the 1941 biennial of the National Federation of Music Clubs represent the clearest examples of the composer’s methods and aims for

Anglo-American modal compositions. The NFMC sponsored two new works from

Buchanan for their biennial, a task that excited her after a decade spent running the White

Top Folk Festival and teaching courses at the University of Richmond. “You see, I’m really a composer,” she wrote to H.S. Latham on January 4, 1940, while composing the biennial pieces, “and I can’t even get a chance at it, and have hardly even begun my real work.”190 She continued, “[I] know I have something to give American music and letters, both in composition and creative literary writing, through absolutely basing my work on the best of my own native material.” From this, we can read the works produced for the

NFMC as Buchanan’s attempt to showcase her racial theories and demonstrate the possibilities of Anglo-American modal compositions.

The first piece she produced was a collection of arrangements of folk songs

Buchanan had collected at the White Top Folk Festival, collectively dubbed the White

Top Folksong Series. The three songs that made up this series are “Greenwood Side (The

Cruel Mother),” “At The Foot of Yonders Mountain,” and “The Old Devil Flew Over the

189 Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Guggenheim Application” (January 22, 1940), Series A, Folder 20, AMB. 190 Annabel Morris Buchanan to H.S. Latham, January 4, 1940, Series A, Folder 20, AMB. Dye 96

Mow (The Farmer’s Curst Wife).” “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies,” an arrangement commissioned for Buchanan by the National Federation of Music Clubs in

1932, was added to this series as well. The Philomel Singers, a 65-member choral ensemble based in Seattle who performed at the biennial, also requested a special choral work. For them, Buchanan wrote Wings, an original work in the Mixolydian mode, set for piano and SSA choir. As in many of her compositions, the parts arrangement for Wings and the White Top Folksong Series reflect Buchanan’s commitment to women’s music clubs; the voices are set for “women’s chorus,” meaning two soprano parts and one alto part, and the instrumentation is just piano. The works could easily be scaled down for a smaller ensemble or trio, and the piano instrumentation meant that these pieces could be performed by a small music club, or by amateur musicians performing in a home or a classroom.

The White Top Folksong Series in particular reflects the direct inspiration

Buchanan took from her own collection of Appalachian folk music. “The Old Devil Flew

Over the Mow” and “At The Foot of Yonders Mountain” were both collected from

Marion: “Old Devil” was collected from Hattie Sims of Hungry Mother Creek near

Marion, and the text of “Yonder Mountain” came from Mrs. Elgiebell Ferguson of

Marion, while the tune came from Lillie Williams, also of Marion. The other tunes came from farther away: the text of “Greenwood Side” came from Mrs. Cecelia Creech of

Cumberland County, KY, and the tune came from J.W. Phillips of New Tazewell, TN.

The text for “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies” came from Lester Bishop of Marion, but Buchanan set it to a tune by Jilson Setters of Ashland, KY, which Buchanan got from ballad collector and organizer of the American Folk Song Festival Jean Thomas. The Dye 97 arrangements in this series often had their mode clearly labeled: “Tender Ladies” and

“Old Devil” are in Dorian mode, while “Greenwood Side” is aeolian.191

With this series, Buchanan reiterated her commitment to furthering an Anglo-

American cultural heritage in the twentieth century. As the title of the series suggests, the tunes were likely collected at the White Top Folk Festival or reflected its spirit, which was characterized in a publicity release for the biennial as aiming to “discover and preserve the best of our native Anglo-American folk song, balladry, dances, and folk arts.”192 The songs in the series also reflect Buchanan’s efforts to introduce the audience to the folk modes and to Anglo-Saxon folk culture generally. This aim was explicitly stated in program notes for a 1934 concert in Winfield, Kansas, hosted by the

Philharmonic-Apollo Music Clubs, in which Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies was performed as a standalone piece. “The work was written to demonstrate the possibilities of our native folk material as the basis of American composition,” the notes state, “as

Mrs. Buchanan is particularly interested in helping to establish a national music for

America, founded on our Anglo-Saxon folk music.”193 At the NFMC biennial, the

Philomel Singers helped to further this effort by dressing in “early American costume,” possibly colonial garb, although it is unclear exactly what the singers wore.

Wings demonstrated one way in which composers might apply Buchanan’s theory and compositional practice to works that weren’t literal arrangements of folk songs.

Written in D Mixolydian mode, and arranged for women’s choir and piano

191 The mode of “At the Foot of Yonder Mountain” is not labeled, but I am calling it G Ionian because of the G tonic with an absent 7^ except for as an occasional passing tone, and heavy emphasis on vi. 192 “National Federation of Music Clubs Biennial Publicity Release” (March 22, 1941), Series A, Folder 23, AMB. 193 Philharmonic-Apollo Music Clubs, “A Program of Folk Music: American, English, and English- American” (Winfield, Kansas, March 7, 1934), Series A, Folder 133, AMB. Dye 98 accompaniment, Wings was set not to a collected folk tune, but to one of Buchanan’s own poems. In a letter to music publisher George Fischer on December 30, 1940, Buchanan talked about her plans for composing Wings, writing that it would likely be about the length and style as April, a poem setting she had composed for the biennial of the

National League of American Pen Women in 1932.194 With Wings, Buchanan effectively tied together two major strains of her compositional style, linking her folk music work and modal compositional style to her earlier work setting poetry, mainly pieces written by women, to music for voice and piano. Wings would be a model for Buchanan’s later compositions like her largest-scale work, The Moon Goes Down (1962). This multi- movement choral work was created to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War, and included folk songs and negro spirituals collected by Buchanan as well as modal settings of poems by southern women poets Emma Gray Trigg, Gertrude Boatwright Claytor, and

Elizabeth Palmer Tyler.195 Wings, Buchanan’s first modal work that isn’t a direct setting of a folk song, represents the composer’s equal commitments to her own white cultural heritage and the musical-social organizations created by and for white women. It also shows how a eugenic ideology can be subtly slipped into a work with no outward white nationalist characteristics. Whether they were or were not accompanied by overt talk of a white Anglo-Saxon racial heritage, Annabel Morris Buchanan’s modal compositions are all a part of the composer’s effort to create a distinctly white and European artistic culture in America.

194 Annabel Morris Buchanan to George Fischer, December 23, 1940, Series A, Folder 22, AMB; Annabel Morris Buchanan, “Performances of Compositions, to Nov. 1, 1934” (November 1, 1934), Series A, Folder 14, AMB. 195 Although beyond the scope of this chapter, The Moon Goes Down deserves further consideration. It represents a synthesis of the poetry and music of Southern white women. Additionally, setting the piece the Civil War South is particularly striking given the large civil rights demonstrations happening concurrently in the South. Dye 99

Conclusion

In Virginia, the majority of the work to carry out the missives of the 1924 Racial Integrity

Act (RIA) was done by white women, writes Historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae.

Women legally categorized Virginia residents according to the directive of the RIA while working as midwives, schoolteachers, local registrars, public welfare superintendents, and nurses, participating “in the actual cartography of race.”196 Employers of these women may have believed, as did Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office in

Cold Springs Harbor, New York, that “feminine tactfulness” made women particularly skilled at eugenics work.197 Beyond their official work duties, wealthy and middle-class white Virginia women invited white supremacist and eugenicist thinking into their social lives through organized clubs such as the Colonial Dames of America, the United

Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Women’s Racial Integrity Club.198 Eugenics is more than just a set of laws or a scientific philosophy; it is a white supremacist mode of thinking that pervades the culture of wealthy English descendants in America that has been used to justify racial integrity and social inequality between races in America at least since Jefferson invoked biological racism in his Notes on the State of Virginia.199

Eugenicist white supremacy has been performed and perpetuated in the minutiae of everyday life, with white women acting, as Elizabeth Gillespie McRae calls it, as

“segregation’s constant gardeners.”200

196 McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 26. 197 Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: ‘Women’s Work” in Biology,” 636. 198 McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 31. 199 Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia, Carter G. Woodson Institute Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 26–33. 200 McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 19. Dye 100

Annabel Morris Buchanan’s folk mode compositional theory and her decades of work within women’s music clubs is a part of the constant pervasive work to advance a white supremacist cause and keep power and national identity securely in the hands of the white elite class. Buchanan’s work was not carried out in government offices or medical facilities, but in classrooms and concert halls as an effort to align the American sound with a racialized folk identity. Music club women ran in the same social circles as white supremacists advocating for eugenic racial integrity laws, which the example of John

Powell so neatly displays. The members of women’s music clubs were also white and usually either wealthy or middle-class, the population who benefitted most from eugenics laws and who considered themselves most under threat from integration, shifting population demographics, and racial equality laws. Music clubs were also eagerly using nationalist rhetoric to tie themselves to the success of the state, and were enthusiastically riding the folk song composition trend at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is thus highly likely that women’s music clubs would understand and support white nationalist endeavors like Buchanan’s modal compositions.

The example of Annabel Morris Buchanan can hopefully serve as a corrective to several common ideas about white supremacy and the role of white women in advancing white supremacy. First, tying Buchanan’s folk music work and her compositions directly to the eugenics movement rejects any efforts to frame her work as less dangerous simply because of a lack of overt violence. It counters a liberal desire to divorce the daily presence and mundane expressions of white supremacy from its violent historical context and ongoing political power. reframing it as simply one of many expressions of American cultural diversity. This desire seeks to deny or minimize the threat of white supremacist Dye 101 violence by framing it as largely harmless, with the vast majority of violence committed by a few bad actors. An example can be seen in Virginia in 2019, when Rep. David

Toscano characterized the University of Virginia men’s basketball team’s NCAA

Championship win as an opportunity for Charlottesville to heal from the white supremacist terror attacks in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12, 2017, in which white nationalist group member James Alex Fields killed anti-racist protester Heather Heyer and injured many others by driving his car into a group of protesters marching in the street. “If there were Antifa or white supremacists [at the street party following the UVA team’s win],” Toscano said, “they were all wearing orange and celebrating together.”201

University of Virginia English professor Lisa Woolfork characterized this statement as “a baffling claim [that] dangerously naturalizes ‘white supremacists’ as just another set of fans.”202 Similarly, Buchanan’s insistence on “the aristocracy of [the] Anglo-Saxon race,” and her close connection with the author of the Racial Integrity Act, key to her musical compositions, was presented by women’s music clubs as part of their larger, more diverse display of America’s many folk nationalities—white supremacist ideas absent of any vulgar signifiers like the burning cross or the lynching noose. As McRae writes, white supremacy performed in small ways on a more local level, and in cultural arenas not easily regulated by national and state-level policies, works powerfully to maintain white supremacy, eugenicist thought, and social segregation through generations. It is successful precisely because it is difficult to eradicate through laws.203

201 Lisa Woolfork, “Virginia’s Basketball Champs Are Heroes. But Their Victory Isn’t Charlottesville’s ‘Redemption,’” CNN, April 12, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/opinions/university-of-virginia- mens-basketball-charlottesville-woolfork/index.html.. 202 Ibid. 203 McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 18. Dye 102

Additionally, this work seeks to counter a tendency to marginalize white women in America’s white supremacist history, a tendency intimately tied to the previously mentioned desire. Instead, I argue not only that white women like Buchanan excitedly furthered the white supremacist mission, but that their organizing power and social organizations were key to their success in this endeavor. Couched in artistic, cultural endeavors that hold little political power when considered as individual works, white supremacist practices like Buchanan’s are not taken as seriously as political documents like the Racial Integrity Act, whose purpose is clearly written, and whose effects are clearly seen. The genteel nature of folk song settings like Buchanan’s can also cause some cognitive dissonance in the listener, who does not hear this music as threatening in the same way as a threatening letter from the Ku Klux Klan, for example. White women are framed as gentle nurturing mothers, or as submissive wives simply following along with the efforts of their white supremacist husbands. The aesthetic markings of

Buchanan’s compositional works, and their performance within the cultural space of the women’s music club, carry the signifiers of early-twentieth century feminine society.

Far from being relegated to the margins of white supremacist culture, however, femininity and its soft, nurturing associations has played a critical role in advancing white supremacist culture and thought. While rarely discussed in histories of women’s work in the name of white supremacy, music is a means by which women could express white supremacist values wrapped in the trappings of non-threatening femininity. Political scientist Nancy Love explored a more contemporary example of feminine white power music in her study of Prussian Blue, the white supremacist folk duo of twins Lynx and

Lamb Gaede. Love noted Prussian Blue’s soft presentation, emphasis on the nuclear Dye 103 family, and wrote that “Neo-Nazi folk music reinvokes cultural traditions and collective memories rooted in racial segregation and recasts them for a trans-national white supremacist movement.”204 Buchanan’s “recasting” of collected folk songs as art pieces based on the musical mechanics of Anglo-Saxon expression fits this definition as well as

Love’s description of a “white power music,” which, “express[es] profound aversions to cultural differences, and reveal[s] a deeply-rooted pre- or extra-linguistic white collective memory and political imaginary.”205 Their performance in musical, gendered spaces has marginalized them in scholarly discourse on white supremacy in America.

The twenty-first century reader will likely hear Buchanan’s plea to “make

America truly musical,” and the General Federation of Women’s Club’s “Hear America

First” campaign echoed in Make America Great Again, and America First, the 2016 presidential campaign slogans of Donald Trump, whose campaign was explicitly endorsed by former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke. These slogans are far from exclusive to music club women and the Trump campaign, but have resounded through fascist, white nationalist political operations throughout the last century. Still, Donald

Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and election night victory are particularly relevant here because of the pre-election hope that conservative women would disavow their husbands in the privacy of the voting booth and cast their vote for Hillary Clinton, as well as the ensuing shock when it was revealed that, in fact, 52% of white women had voted for a man running on a politically conservative platform who had built a celebrity persona

204 Nancy S. Love, “Back to the Future: Trendy Fascism, the Trump Effect, and the Alt-Right,” New Political Science 39, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 266. 205 Love, 265. Dye 104 around casual sexual assault and playboy philandering.206 This statistic lead many to claim that these women had voted “against their interests.” What I hope this scholarship contributes to is the reality that the interests of white women have rarely been based on gender alone, even when they operate in spaces defined by gender, such as women’s clubs, and that the interests of white supremacists are often enthusiastically supported by white women even though the white supremacist ideal rests on a patriarchal structuring of the home and the nation. Annabel Buchanan had a tumultuous, at times emotionally abusive personal relationship with John Powell, yet she carried out the white supremacist mission they shared long after they fell out of personal and professional contact. She did so largely with the support of other white women and the strength of women’s organizations.

206 Jill Filipovic, “Trump’s Win Boils down to White Women,” CNN, accessed November 11, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/opinions/trumps-win-women-filipovic/index.html. Dye 105

Chapter 3: Intimate Inequalities: The Twentieth Century White Home as Folk-Song Field

Site

On their 1939 Southern recording trip, John Lomax and Ruby Terrill Lomax stopped in

Livingston, Alabama, where they knew they’d find good African American folk music and a lot of it. They knew this because they had a valuable informant in Ruby Pickens

Tartt, a white Livingston woman who had been collecting black folk songs and folk tales for the WPA for the past few years. The 1939 trip was the Lomaxes second visit to

Livingston, as they realized that they had barely scratched the surface of Tartt’s knowledge when they first visited in 1937. In the notes for the 1939 trip, John Lomax wrote, “Mrs. Ruby Pickens Tartt was again our chief assistant, guide, and ramrod,” adding that during their four-day stay, Tartt drove nearly two hundred miles in total to find singers and bring them to the Lomax’s microphone, which they set up at Tartt’s home on Baldwin Hill, a high point in the Livingston area. To the Lomaxes, one of the biggest perks of having Ruby Pickens Tartt as an informant was the relationship the white woman had with Sumter County’s black community. In his notes, Lomax characterized the Livingston recordings as, “an opportunity for [the Negroes] to show [Tartt] their appreciation,” noting later, “She has done so much for the Negroes of the community and they love and trust her to a degree that they rarely fail her.”207

The Lomaxes relied on many local informants like Ruby Pickens Tartt on their recording trips, most often visiting prisons in order to find a group of black singers who

207 John A Lomax and Ruby T Lomax, “1939 Southern Recording Trip Fieldnotes” (1939), John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip (AFC 1939/001), American Folklife Center, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afcss39.fn0001. Dye 106 could be coerced or strong-armed into singing for their microphone. The field notes for the 1939 trip show that the Lomaxes visited ten different penal facilities: Clemens Farm in Brazoria County, Texas; Ramsey State Farm in Otey, Texas; Central State Farm in

Sugarland, Texas; Darrington Farm; the State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas; Goree

Farm for Women in Huntsville, Texas; Cummins State Farm in Arkansas; State Farm

Camp #9 in Arkansas City, Arkansas; Parchman Farm in Mississippi; and the State

Penitentiary in Raiford, Florida. At Sugarland and Darrington, the Lomaxes were disappointed to find singers who “imitated radio artists” and did not even set up their microphones. At the Ramsey State Farm, where the Lomaxes found James “Iron Head”

Baker, a singer who had previously toured with them, they also recorded a man who sang behind three sets of locks and witnessed a prisoner standing on a barrel as punishment for a minor infraction. On these prison trips, the Lomaxes ate with the white prison guards, and at Cummins State Farm they worked with Captain Allen, a man whose wife kept repairing the right armhole of his shirts, which often tore loose when he flogged the prisoners in the fields. In Livingston, however, the Lomaxes felt they had found a collector who not only was able to find many singers who knew “the old songs,” but also shared a loving, respectful relationship with her black informants. However, the white woman collector drew her song collecting practice from antebellum practices of domesticity where the white mistress of the house maintained unquestioned authority over, but imagined intimacy with, black slaves working in the household. These same practices, carried into the post-Reconstruction Southern home, facilitated the work of white women folklorists like Ruby Pickens Tartt and, through informing the Lomaxes and others, shaped institutional representation of African American folk music. Dye 107

The recordings made by Lomax in Livingston are some of the best-known examples of African American folk songs in Alabama. Lomax’s favorites—the religious singer

Dock Reed, his cousin Vera Hall, and the storyteller Rich Amerson—became widely known at the Library of Congress. Hall in particular enjoyed some success as a singer.

The composer Elie Siegmeister visited Livingston in the early 1940s and incorporated

Hall’s music into his choral group’s repertoire.208 Hall also traveled outside of Alabama to perform in a concert of folk music at Columbia University in 1948.209 Still, when Ruby

Pickens Tartt invited Vera Hall to accompany her in a public lecture in the 1950s, given either at Livingston College or a local women’s club, she played to the comfort of the audience of white women by introducing the black singer as “a former cook of mine,” before mentioning Hall’s over four-hundred Library of Congress recordings. Here, Ruby

Pickens Tartt made the power relations between her and Hall very clear, and perhaps even hinted at how she came to recognize Vera Hall as a singer.

Ruby Pickens Tartt was far from the only white woman who collected folk music from black laborers working for her family and other white families in the area. While

Ruby, in her writings, never labelled herself a folklorist nor even a person with a particularly musical ear, her collecting practice mirrors those of contemporary professional white women folklorists collecting black folk songs, and even echoes the practices of white women responsible for collecting and editing the first published

American book of slave music in the United States. Her collecting work also resonated with the literary world, where white women writers had long based their creative writing on real stories from and imagined perspectives of the black people who had labored

208 Wade, The Beautiful Music All Around Us, 154. 209 Wade, 159. Dye 108 within their households. In this chapter, I place her work within a tradition of white women collecting songs and stories from, and basing their creative output on, hired black domestic workers.

Folk music scholars have made frequent note of the Lomaxes practice of collecting in prisons as a way to ensure authenticity through segregation but have not devoted sustained attention to the structures of sharecropping and domestic labor and the way that those labor systems facilitated and shaped folk song collection in the twentieth century.

This lacuna may stem from scholars’ lack of attention to white women song collectors, who, perhaps more than their male counterparts, collected closer to their homes. In this chapter, I look at how post-Reconstruction labor systems that kept black workers indebted to white bosses, and thus tethered to the white home in a manner very similar to that of the antebellum South, were used as song collecting field sites by white women folklorists. Bringing white women collectors and the post-Reconstruction home into the narrative of American folk song collection helps to dispel the notion, perpetuated by the

Lomaxes on their recording trips, that collectors sought out and were able to find musicians and communities truly isolated from the trappings of modern society or any sort of racial and cultural mixing.

While prisons presumably isolated black folks from popular music culture or the supposedly dominating influence of modern white society, they were not impermeable, as

Erich Nunn writes: “While Jim Crow may have ensured that [prisoner] Morris and his men experienced ‘no familiar contact with whites,’ the radio proved to be a powerful force that helped undermine the segregation and isolation that Lomax understood to be Dye 109 necessary for the preservation of ‘primitive’ folk songs.”210 The standard of “no familiar contact with whites” appears to be a non-issue for the Lomaxes when they visited

Livingston. Rather, a hierarchical racial “integration,” common in the early twentieth century upper-class Southern home, seemed to be part of the “authenticity” the Lomaxes sought. In his field notes from the 1939 trip, John Lomax noted of the McDonald family,

Joe, Mollie (Mary), Janie, and Jim, “They had been ‘raised with white folks’ and from them learned some of their songs. They had the reputation of being good songsters, and probably good clowns, and were often invited by their ‘white folks’ to entertain guests.”211 Here, it is apparent that learning songs from white people did not render the

McDonalds as inauthentic in Lomax’s eyes, as one might expect after learning of the prison recording trips. Perversely, the McDonald family’s history of close contact with white people while enslaved, and their continued work for white households, likely even contributed to their folkloristic appeal.

Existing biographical scholarship on Ruby Pickens Tartt has done a good job of chronicling her life and her work, but too often elides the racial power structures at play in Tartt’s collecting or treats them as an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise impressive body of work. This chapter will build on the existing literature on Tartt and on black folk song collection in the early twentieth century by interrogating how racial power structures in the early twentieth century South, particularly for white women, both informed collecting practices and facilitated the ability to collect widely. I connect Tartt to a larger culture and history of white women collecting black folk songs, one where the

210 Erich Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination, The New Southern Studies; New Southern Studies (Athens, London: The University of Georgia Press, 2015), 79. 211 Lomax and Lomax, “1939 Southern Recording Trip Fieldnotes.” Dye 110 home is a central site for song collecting, and whose reception circulates among an audience similar to the collector in terms of race, gender, and class. In this chapter I compare Tartt’s work to those of Texas folklorist Dorothy Scarborough and abolitionist

Lucy McKim Garrison. Garrison is best known for her work on Slave Songs of the United

States, the first published volume of African American folk music in the United States. A white woman from Philadelphia, Garrison translated songs she collected from slaves and freedmen in Georgia into published voice and piano arrangements in order to bolster the abolitionist cause up North. Scarborough, a writer and folklorist from Texas, wrote the semi-fictional ethnography From A Southern Porch when she was living in New York in

1919. Scarborough took her sister’s Richmond summer home as a site of “genuine negro folk songs.”

White women collectors, when seeking out black folk music, operated within white female spheres of influence. They acted as the plantation mistress when seeking out black folk music, using their position of power and their control over their domestic spaces in order to access and obtain black folk songs. They then translated collected songs and stories into forms, such as parlor sheet music or short stories for magazines, that reached a large audience made up of many white women like themselves. Putting Tartt into context with collectors like Scarborough and Garrison, as well as in context of early twentieth century white womanhood reveals the power structures present in the collecting work and gives scholars a fuller understanding of the collected work.

For these women, song collecting was a domestic act. As such, their work can be analyzed through literature scholar Amy Kaplan’s theory of “manifest domesticity,” which accounts for the role of the home in politics of national expansion and empire Dye 111 building. As Kaplan asserts, the domestic is positioned “in intimate opposition to the foreign,” and relies on the foreign for meaning and potency. In her analysis, the domestic not only defines itself by drawing boundaries between itself and the foreign, but also acts as an agent of manifest destiny through “domestication,” the conquering and taming of the foreign by enveloping it within the domestic. For writers like Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the influential Godey’s Ladies Book and author of the 1852 novel Liberia,

American slavery was a civilizing, domesticating mission.212 White women collecting black folk songs in their own homes in the early twentieth century, during a time when whites responded to black social, cultural, and political gains by reinscribing the plantation home as a site of comfort and stability, functioned as manifest domesticity by framing the conscription of black workers in the white household as natural and beneficial.

White women collecting songs from black laborers works as manifest domesticity in two ways. First, it frames the postbellum Southern home, often a site for collecting and recording black folk music, as a space of domestication. Collecting songs from black laborers in their employ, or framing their plantation-style homes as neutral, comfortable spaces for black song-making and performance, these collectors imagined their homes as a civilized and civilizing space, furthering the “house/field” dichotomy from the days of slavery. Second, it helps us consider the acts of transcribing and translating folk songs and stories as domesticating practices. White women collectors often engaged with black song-making by translating the songs into sheet music that they and other educated white people could perform, and they turned folk tales into short stories and longer literary

212 Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 594. Dye 112 works intended for white consumption. They ascribed a moral position to their work; their translation work was conceived and received as benevolent, sympathetic acts revealing the humanity of a marginalized people. Through the lens of “manifest domesticity,” these practices can instead be read as attempting to domesticate black expression by rendering it intelligible to white audiences through translation into familiar forms and by presenting black people as under the control of the white home.

In this chapter, I contextualize Ruby Pickens Tartt’s song collecting work within a larger tradition of white women collecting and translating black songs and stories, comparing her to two of her contemporaries, folklorist Dorothy Scarborough and writer

Julia Peterkin, both of whom used their black laborers as sources for collection and creative inspiration. I argue that these women relied on societal and economic structures of sharecropping and domestic labor that kept black people in debt to wealthy whites and kept the twentieth century white home sonically similar to the antebellum plantation. I then argue that the practice of white translations of black songs and stories, a practice dating before the Civil War and displayed in Lucy McKim Garrison’s work for Slave

Songs of the Unites States, while ostensibly centered on black voices, can instead be read through the lens of whiteness and the collector’s own investment in maintaining the power held by white society. Their association with black folk culture allowed them to explore their identities as white women by trying on the foreign “other” while supporting and maintaining the racial hierarchies that benefitted them. They played the plantation mistress and the modern career woman interchangeably, although sometimes at the same time. Decrying the violently oppressive racism in the Jim Crow South, they fashioned Dye 113 their work and themselves as sentimental and progressive, even as they maintained antebellum power structures from the comfort of their own plantation-style homes.

Ruby Pickens Tartt

Born on January 13, 1880, to a wealthy, formerly-slave-owning family in Livingston,

Ruby Pickens Tartt made a name for herself in the 1930s and ‘40s by collecting black folk songs, folk tales, and slave narratives. The writer Carl Carmer, inspired by Tartt, wrote her into his best-selling novel, Stars Fell on Alabama, as Mary Louise, and later called her “my most unforgettable character.”213 In the 1950s, Harold Courlander travelled to Livingston to record some of the folk singers for the 1956 Folkways compilation, Negro Folk Music of Alabama. For Courlander and folkorists such as John and Alan Lomax and John Jacob Niles, Ruby Pickens Tartt was the chief point of contact for black folk music in the Sumter County area.

Tartt’s early life was one befitting an upper-class Southern white woman; she studied for two years at the Livingston Female Academy, beginning in 1887, under “feminist, reformer, and educator” Julia Tutwiler. She attended Sophie Newcomb College, a college for Southern women in New Orleans known primarily for its pottery program, in 1899, and studied painting under William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art in

1901. After returning home, she married her childhood sweetheart William Pratt Tartt in

1904 and had one daughter, Fannie Pickens, with him.214

213 Carl Carmer, “Miss Ruby, My most unforgettable character,” The Ruby Pickens Tartt Papers, Series 3, Box 1, Folder C, Item 3. Alabama Room, Julia Tutwiler Library. University of West Alabama, Livingston, Alabama. This collection is abbreviated as RPT in further citations. 214 Virginia Pounds Brown, Laurella Owens, and Ruby Pickens Tartt, Toting the Lead Row: Ruby Pickens Tartt, Alabama Folklorist (University, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1981). Dye 114

The Great Depression turned Ruby’s financial security around and started her career as a collector of black folklore. When she took a sewing job in York, Alabama, despite being a poor sewer, Tartt looked forward to this job because, as the only white woman on the team, she knew that she would be put in charge when the foreman was away, and she would get an opportunity to hear her black co-workers singing. In a letter to Alan Lomax,

Tartt described these perks:

Imagine my delight one day when I found I must get a job and at once, to find the only one available was on a sewing project with negro women. My friends were horrified, they thought I must be mad, but I knew I could learn to sew and would and that some day, because I was the only “white woman” as the foreman called me, I’d be left in charge for she was from some distance out of town. On those days I knew we’d earn our pay checks, but I also knew the negroes would sing and be happy for I had known them always and they me. Now everytime I see one of Sumter County’s little underprivileged boys having difficulty walking, I know those were the pants cut by me and sewed up backwards on the day the young NYA negro boy sang ‘Go Down Moses’!215

When she joined the Sumpter County Writers Program, a project of the WPA, in 1937, her first assignment was to collect negro spirituals. This assignment was a relief to Ruby, who commented in a later autobiographical sketch, “the lord was with me for I knew a great many [spirituals] and I certainly didn’t know how to write.”216 She mailed her first collection of spirituals to John Lomax at the Library of Congress, beginning a professional partnership that would last until Lomax’s death in 1948.217 John Lomax visited Tartt to record black folk singers in Sumter county in 1937, 1938, and 1940.218

215 Ruby Pickens Tartt to Alan Lomax, n.d. RPT, Series 4, Box 24, Folder FF, Item 4. Emphasis mine. 216 Ruby Pickens Tartt, Autobiographical Sketch. RPT. Series 2, Box 1, Folder B Item 13. 217 Brown, Owens, and Tartt, Toting the Lead Row, 13. 218 Olivia Solomon and Jack Solomon, eds., Honey in the Rock: The Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection of Religious Folk Songs from Sumter County, Alabama (Macon, Ga: Mercer University Press, 1992), ix. Dye 115

Throughout their relationship, Lomax encouraged Tartt to submit her collected stories to magazines for publication, promising large sums of money for the stories she had heard from her black informants.219 At one point, Lomax even offered to buy the house on

Baldwin Hill for the Tartt family so Ruby would not have to rent it and could live in a manner that befitted a woman of her class background.220

According to historians Olivia and Jack Solomon, Ruby Pickens Tartt made musical transcriptions of both secular and spiritual folk songs, although the music for the spirituals is lost.221 In my own research, I have not found any musical transcriptions, nor any indication that Tartt had musical training and skill. Despite knowing singers and having collected a large number of folk songs, Tartt always claimed inexpertise about folk music and claimed not to have any musical knowledge. In her public talk with Vera

Hall, Tartt justified the decision to bring in Hall by saying that she herself was unable to sing the tunes. She told the audience, “You who know music no doubt know a lot more about Folk-Music than I do, but I am just talking to those who are not musicians those who are perhaps just as familiar with Folk-Tunes as I am […] All I can claim is an ear for music tho I’m not certain which ear.”222 When talking about black folk music, Tartt instead spoke of spirituals as expressions of hope during times of hardship, echoing language used by nineteenth century abolitionists. She often spoke of a childhood spent listening to black laborers sing as they picked cotton or gathered around the back porch of her family home. Tartt’s connection to the black folk music of her area was one of

219 John Lomax to Ruby Pickens Tartt, December 21, 1942. RPT. Series 4A, Box 24 Folder FF-3, Item 33. 220 John Lomax to Ruby Pickens Tartt, December 4, 1940. RPT. Series 4A, Box 24, Folder FF-3, Item 26. 221 Solomon and Solomon, Honey in the Rock, ix. 222 Ruby Pickens Tartt, Typewritten pages on folk music. RPT. Series 7, Box 3, Folder F-1, Item 6. Dye 116 familiarity and sentimentality, centered around her childhood and her home, rather than one of musicianship.

For Ruby Pickens Tartt, growing up as the descendent of a slave master was key to her song collecting. Tartt’s collecting methods came to her through her father and had always involved a power dynamic in which the white collector coaxed songs out of a black laborer or subordinate. Ruby’s father, William King Pickens, instilled in his daughter an ear for black folk music. Ruby’s first exposure to black folk songs was from the mouths of black sharecroppers that her father would buy cotton from. As a young girl, she’d accompany her father on some of these trips, where he’d encourage her to have the laborers sing to her to pass the time. In a 1972 interview with Robert B. Gilbert, a

Professor of English at the University of West Alabama, Ruby Pickens Tartt recalled some of her earliest memories of black singing. “I’d go with [my father] in the buggy out to some little farm or something, to look at the cotton, and he’d say, you can get’em to sing if you want to […] so I said alright, two or three of em coming up and I said sing some songs and that’s when they’d sing.”223 Although the young Ruby did not consider writing these songs down for posterity at the time, she became aware that the songs had exchange value. As she told Gilbert, the singers would sometimes ask her to compensate them for taking time away from their sharecropping labor.

…so picking cotton with him is where we’d have ‘em singing, and they’d say we gon’ get beat up for this, that meant pay ‘em a little something, cuz he’s going to have to account for not having picked more cotton. […] Of course they never got together and sing like that, they were always too busy picking the cotton. I think they had a pretty hard life, don’t you?224

223 Ruby Pickens Tartt interviewed by Dr. Robert B. Gilbert, August 10, 1972. RPT. Series 21, Item 3. 224 Ibid. Dye 117

When Tartt wasn’t out in the cotton field with her father, she could find a ready chorus of black singers on the back stoop of her home. In the 1972 interview, Ruby

Pickens Tartt described a scene in the kitchen of the Livingston home where she grew up, where her family would feed a hungry crowd of people and then ask for a song as compensation. Describing a scene that occurred around the turn of the century, the 92- year-old Tartt used racial slurs that were likely commonplace in her old family home.

“Always the kitchen was filled with n—rs all on the back step to the kitchen, and [my father would] go, Mary, give’ em a good dinner, and the cook gave whoever would come, and then that n—r would sing, and father would say ‘I want you to sing while you’re eating my food’.”225 As she told Gilbert, Ruby would soon emulate her father’s behavior, asking black folks her family was feeding to sing as payment for their meal. “They’d put their feet down when they’d see me coming and stop eating, ‘Miss Ruby this sure is a good dinner, what can us do?’ and I said, you can sing! I like to hear you sing…”226

From childhood, Ruby learned that benevolence in the form of charity would be rewarded by having black people sing for her. Her father again influenced her collecting when the two of them would visit black church services. William Pickens had a practice of using money to coax black singers into performing the tunes that their white interlopers would enjoy. In a letter to Alan Lomax, Tartt recalled these early memories.

“In the horse and buggy days I spent Saturday afternoons with him sitting out near one of their country churches and listening to them sing. When he particularly liked a song he would make another generous contribution to the preacher and it was repeated. I’ve kept

225 Ibid. 226 Ibid. Dye 118 this up through the years.”227 This experience from her childhood may have guided a later episode of Ruby’s life, when she began collecting songs for the WPA. Upon attending services at the Dug Hill Church, Ruby was dismayed that the black congregation sang from hynmals. She offered to buy a heating stove for she church on the condition that they do away with the hymnals and only sing the “old songs.”228 More than an interested bystander, Tartt clearly felt comfortable dictating “authentic” culture to those she was collecting from, and felt comfortable using her wealth as leverage to hear the songs she desired.

The Tradition of White Women Collecting Black Songs

In collecting black folk songs from people who worked for her family, and in using her role as plantation mistress as a strategy for song collecting, Ruby Pickens Tartt joined a cadre of white women who used their racial, gendered social positionality to fuel their cultural and creative endeavors. In this section, I introduce the work of folklorist Dorothy

Scarborough and fiction author Julia Peterkin in order to highlight the similarities between Tartt’s song collecting work and the work of other white women contemporaries. Further, I show that this practice was widespread; publications from the

Farmville Normal School in Virginia and the archived papers of the Virginia Folklore

227 Ruby Pickens Tartt to Alan Lomax, November 3, 1941. RPT. Series 4A, Box 24, Folder FF, Item 4. 228 Most historians writing on this event paint Ruby’s actions in a positive, charitable light, while I see it as an act of coercion based in the racial hierarchies of that time. Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens have written, “She knew she would keep going as long as the blacks kept singing their songs, so rich and so beautiful, that grew out of and defined their culture and experience.” Brown, Owens, and Tartt, Toting the Lead Row, 10.; Alan Brown and Davis Taylor cast Tartt in a progressive light when describing this episode, writing, “For the most part, Tartt was ahead of her time in the recognition of the value of the right cultural heritage of the blacks and of the urgent need to preserve it.” Alan Brown, David Vassar Taylor, and Ruby Pickens Tartt, eds., Gabr’l Blow Sof’: Sumter County, Alabama Slave Narratives, 1st ed (Livingston, AL: Livingston Press, The University of West Alabama, 1997), viii. Dye 119

Society are full of examples of young white women who immediately looked to their families ex-slaves and black hired help when asked to collect folk songs. I then connect these women to a longer tradition of white women collecting black songs and stories for creative and professional use by linking their work to that of Caroline Howard Gilman, a

South Carolina novelist working in the mid-nineteenth century who published folk songs and hymns collected from enslaved people in her own children’s magazine. For at least a century, white women had put labor into, and, at times, built careers and gained artistic recognition from, collecting songs from enslaved Africans and their descendants working within their households.

Dorothy Scarborough was a Texas folklorist and a creative writer active in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a folklorist, Dorothy Scarborough was active in the

Texas Folklore Society upon its founding in 1910 and served at president from 1914-

1915. Her folkloric interest in Negro folklore and folk songs is reflected in her most famous publication, the 1925 collection On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs. As historian

Marybeth Hamilton has noted, Dorothy Scarborough used her race and gender strategically when collecting folk songs. In interviews with older, male informants,

Hamilton writes, Scarborough “posed herself a dutiful southern daughter, coaxing [the informant] back to a childhood soundscape of tenderness and emotion.”229 For older, white informants, Scarborough posed as a daughter, but for black informants, she posed as a plantation mistress.

Scarborough’s plantation mistress/folklorist approach is best seen in her 1919 publication, From A Southern Porch, a romantic ode to Southern country living that

229 Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 78. Dye 120 promised “genuine negro folk songs, not ‘cooked’ or edited in any way.”230 Collected in both Virginia and Texas, where they were “taken down from dusky lips,” the negro folk songs in From a Southern Porch are placed in the mouths of fictionalized black workers, some of whom visit the Richmond home setting (a slightly fictionalized account of

Scarborough’s sister’s home), most of whom work in the home, and all of whom perform domestic labor for white families in the area.231 There is Mose, the “colorful gardener” at the home, who brings the narrator plants and animals that both delight and intrigue her;

Letitia Elizabeth Sara Katherine Jane Roxy Anna Cora Tippet Morgan, called “Tish,” a young “good looking mullattress” who works as a maid in the home and receives a suitor in the narrative; “Aunt” Mandy the cook, a stereotypical gruff-but-nurturing mammy figure; “Old Aunt” Peggy, a wise old woman who comes with fresh blackberries and songs from the days of slavery; Thomas Jefferson Randolph Jones, sometimes called

“T.J.R.” or “Randy,” a “ginger cake darkey” of ten years, whose name and description indicates he is of mixed race, and who is a deep well of songs and lore; and Milly

Andrews, a beautiful almost-white woman, whose one drop of blackness casts her as a tragic victim of fate in Scarborough’s eyes. While most of From a Southern Porch is fictionalized and romanticized, the folk songs are one of the few things that Scarborough distinguished as a “genuine” product of ethnographic work befitting a career folklorist.

Throughout the narrative, the black characters function as guides for the white woman at its center; they teach her about the flora and fauna of rural Virginia and sing folk songs as humorous offerings, historical artifacts, and lessons about life and love.

Typical of white writing with black characters at the time, Scarborough differentiated her

230 Dorothy Scarborough, From a Southern Porch (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), vii. 231 Scarborough, vii. Dye 121 black characters by writing their speech and song in a phoneticized dialect—“g”s and

“d”s at the end of words are elided, and soft “v,” and “th” sounds are turned into hard

“b”s and “d”s. The negro folk songs serve to add a different perspective to the topic at hand, illustrating Scarborough’s opinion that black folks were naturally more musical than whites, and that song was an extension of speech that “bubbles forth on all occasions.”232 She intersperses her chapter on the entomology of the southern porch with folk songs about insects; Thomas Jefferson Randolph sings a song about the “grass-mo- whopper” and the boll weevil and chases a frog across the yard while singing a song about various rural fauna.

“Way down yonder on de bank-ter-wank, Frogs kin jump from bank to bank. Lighnin’ bugs an’ hootin’ owls. Are a-singin’ songs ob my ol’ gal.”

In another scene, when the narrator is discussing marriage and husbands with a group of other white women, she hears Letitia singing a song about marriage and stops the discussion so the women can hear Letitia’s “contribution of opinion.”

“Oh when I was single, I libed at my ease, But now I am married, I got a husban’ to please! I’m washin’ my chillun An’ puttin’ dem to bed, Wid my husban’ a-scoldin’ me An’ wishin’ I was dead!”233

Although set nearly two decades into the twentieth century, Scarborough’s semi-fictional

Southern porch both looks and sounds very much like an antebellum plantation. In this aspect, From a Southern Porch is part of the Lost Cause writing tradition, which looked

232 Scarborough, 56. 233 Scarborough, 165. Dye 122 back on slavery and planter class life in the antebellum period with wistful nostalgia.

Adding to this is Scarborough favorable contrast between the porch’s romanticized quiet harmony and the noise of Northern urban life. To Scarborough, the southern porch was both the opposite of and the antidote to Northern city living. Apartments, she felt, constricted man’s power, whereas porches expanded it and allowed one to look out onto the wide expanses of the heavens, imagining himself among it.234 Where the urban world of New York, where Scarborough was living when she wrote From a Southern Porch, had a rising entrepreneurial black population, the black folks around the Virginia summer home were portrayed as slow-moving, cheerful, hard-working folks who were happy to talk with and sing to their white employers. Where the city was full of automobiles who

“whirl by with sophisticated snorts and honk-honks, raising resentful dust in whorls,” the roads outside the summer home were full of black folks gaily performing manual labor— a black woman carrying a clothes basket on her head, young “laughing, gay” black boys selling berries, and an “ebony antique” driving a slow mule.235

Sound historian Mark M. Smith has noted that the “quiet” that antebellum planters characterized their plantations was not “silent” at all but abuzz with the sounds of work; a truly quiet plantation would have aroused fears of a brewing rebellion. In essence a plantation’s “quietude” was actually the sound of a workplace filled with obedient workers.236 Hearing enslaved workers singing songs was one way that a plantation owner determined that his plantation was running productively and helped him entertain the idea

234 Scarborough, 6. 235 Scarborough, 8. 236 Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 34. “Sounds made after a certain time […] were noises, and slaves’ production of particular sounds at particular times indicated southern quietude.” Smith also notes that women were considered “important custodians of Southern quietude,” 29. Dye 123 that the plantation setting and the practice of enslavement were natural and beneficial to the people who were enslaved. “Singing slaves were, to masters’ ears, happy slaves, and slave songs—sung at proper times and in appropriate places—helped reaffirm the conviction among masters that not only was all right with their world but their world, in fact, was all right.”237 In this manner, the twentieth century setting where Scarborough placed her “genuine negro folk songs” was sonically indistinguishable from the romantic descriptions of plantations from over a half-century earlier.

Scarborough and Tartt were not unique in their collecting methods. Indeed, when asked to collect old folk songs in the early twentieth century, many whites across the

South turned to their black hired help for songs they knew from childhood. The letters housed in the Virginia Folklore Society archive give a glimpse into the many collectors who contextualized their informants through domestic labor. While collecting for the ballad club of the Farmville Normal School in Virginia, Miss Jennie Tabb wrote that her family version of “The Three Crows,” “may have been learned from an old negro mammy who used to sing a great many old songs.”238 Miss Ruth Geaves, another

Farmville student, submitted a version of ‘Barbara Allen,’ to the ballad club that was sung to her by Isaac Carroll, a black man who learned ballads “from his old ‘missus,’” a

Mrs. Bell, of Wythe County, Virginia.239 While the two songs collected are both English and Scottish ballads, the two students’ choice to frame their informant through the lens of antebellum slavery is important. Both Tabb and Geaves connected their song collecting

237 Smith, 36. 238 State Female Normal School, The Focus. (September 1915), 280. 239 State Female Normal School, The Focus. (January, 1914), 445. Dye 124 work to the antebellum household and the musical exchange between enslaved workers and those who owned them.

“Mammies” in particular were popular song sources. Writing on segregation in the twentieth century, historian Grace Hale notes that the “mammy” was a particularly potent symbol that “reinforced the fiction of continuity that legitimated the new southern white middle class.”240 Letters submitted to the Virginia Folklore Society by white women collectors throughout the state are full of references to mammies as songsters and educators. Katherine Middleton wrote to Alphonso Smith of the Virginia Folklore

Society in July 1914 about several submitted ballads: “[My mother] was taught them by her negro ‘mammy’ who could not read or write, so I think they are ballads.”241

Similarly, Ellen Dana Conway wrote to Smith in 1915, “I notice in the list you sent a ballad called “The Cherry Tree Carol,” and I remember to have heard it sung when I was very young by just one person, my old negro nurse, who has been dead for years.”242

Florida Ashley, of Charlottesville, told of her mother’s nurse: “I am including in this all that my mother and I can remember of a ballad. She taught it to me in the county of my birth, Warren, but she was born and reared in Fluvanna so this particular specimen must have come from the latter county. She is of the opinion that her negro nurse taught it to her.”243 Sending Arthur Kyle Davis a copy of “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” a man named

240 Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 105. 241 Katherine Middleton to Alphonso Smith, July 1914. Papers of Arthur Kyle Davis, 1919-1970. Acc. 9829, Box 10. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Charlottesville, VA. This collection is abbreviated as AKD in further citations. 242 Ellen Dana Conway to Alphonso Smith, November 1, 1915. AKD, Box 10. 243 Florida Ashley to Alphonso Smith, August 29, 1916. AKD, Box 10. Dye 125

W. J. Bartlett noted that he collected the tune from his mother and sisters, “all of whom learned it from their Mammies in Pittsylvania County.”244 South.

The tradition of white people collecting from black domestic workers was a significant part of early twentieth century literature. Often the line between folklore study and literary work was a blurry one; Scarborough’s Southern Porch is a good example of this blurring. Julia Mood Peterkin, the first Southern writer to win a Pulitzer, exemplified this early twentieth century trend. Peterkin made a literary name for herself by writing novels with central black characters, inspired by the workers on her plantation home. As a child, Julia Mood enjoyed a comfortable life that depended on the care of black domestic workers. Her father’s mother’s family were among the wealthiest planters in

South Carolina, and young Julia had grown up in such close proximity to the domestic workers who still maintained her families plantation home that she spoke some Gullah.245

After marrying William George Peterkin, heir to the Lang Syne plantation in South

Carolina, Julia found herself tasked with the duty of becoming a plantation mistress. Julia

Peterkin’s biographer Susan Millar Williams, using a book of Peterkin’s own poems as a reference, frames this choice as one desired by the black staff:

The Peterkins provided food, clothing, and shelter. The hands expected something more, and they looked for it to come from Julia. As the plantation mistress, she must take it upon herself to settle arguments, help people who were in trouble with the law, provide medical care, and give everyone gifts of money, clothing, and furniture. In return, Vinner said, the people would treat her like a Queen.246 Vinner warned Julia that many white women had come to

244 W. J. Bartlett to Arthur Kyle Davis, September 12, 1932. AKD, Box 6. 245 Susan Millar Williams, A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 4. 246 Vinner is Lavinia Berry, a woman born into slavery who had “come with the place” and serves as William and Julia’s nurse. Williams, 8. Dye 126

Lang Syne, and those too weak or too fearful to ‘dominize’ had either been crushed or taken away.247

Here Williams, through Peterkin, frames this order as natural and desirable—the black staff here are said to want a mistress, even implying they cannot function without one.

Through the words of the “mammy” figure in the household, Peterkin framed herself and the role of the plantation mistress as desired and necessary. She would also base her professional career on this model. In the 1920s, the white Julia Peterkin was considered to be one of the nation’s foremost “black” writers.248 She earned the Pulitzer Prize in

1929 for Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), a novel written from the perspective of a black woman. Many in literary society, including black literary society, received Peterkin’s work as sympathetic and beneficial, even though the stories naturalize a plantation-style racial order.249

Ultimately, the twentieth century practice of collecting songs and stories from black laborers—and using those songs as the foundation of a creative and professional life—wasn’t just an expression of nostalgia for the antebellum slavery days, it was a continuation of an antebellum plantation practice largely practiced by white women.

While slaveowners showed an interest in their slaves’ music and often expected slaves to sing and dance for them, actual collection of that music is not documented until around the middle of the nineteenth century.250 When compiling black folk songs in preparation

247 Williams, 9. 248 Nghana tamu Lewis, “The Rhetoric of Mobility, the Politics of Consciousness: Julia Mood Peterkin and the Case of a White Black Writer,” African American Review 38, no. 4 (2004): 590. 249 Elizabeth Robeson, “The Ambiguity of Julia Peterkin,” The Journal of Southern History 61, no. 4 (1995): 764. 250 For more on the politics of song and dance during slavery, see: Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). Thompson argues that slave society was the first American entertainment venue, setting a precedent of racial politics within popular entertainment that continues to the present day. Dye 127 for the publication of Slave Songs of the United States, the first published collection of black folk songs, editor Lucy McKim Garrison drew many from the collection of

Caroline Howard Gilman, a novelist in Charleston, South Carolina.251 While compiling

Slave Songs, Garrison corresponded with Gilman’s daughters about their mother’s collection of songs, an act that Dena Epstein has characterized as, “…form[ing] the link between the northern collectors of slave songs during the Civil War and the antebellum witnesses of the tradition represented by their mother, Caroline Howard Gilman.”252

Gilman collected hymns and work songs sung by slaves and published many of them in her children’s magazine, The Rose Bud.253 The magazine educated children on how to master slave ownership. It offered examples of proper slave management and ideal plantation regulation, taught children forms of deference they might expect from enslaved people, and instructed them in laws such as the pass system, which required enslaved people to carry documentation while traveling from one place to another.254

Gilman’s novel, Recollections of a Southern Matron (1836), was notable at the time for containing more portraits of black slaves than other novels of a similar nature, but relegated the black characters as background color to the white drama at its center.255

Gilman’s manuscript collection of negro folk music from around 1840 is considered to be

251 Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals : Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 323. McKim Garrison corresponded with Annie M. Bowen, Gilman’s daughter, who referenced her mother’s collection. Some spirituals in Slave Songs are listed as belonging to “Mrs. A.M. Bowen’s Collection, (the earliest of them all,).” 252 Epstein, 331. 253 Epstein, 221. The Southern Rose Bud was one of the earliest magazines for children. The example Epstein cites is from 1834. 254 Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property, 13–14. 255 Tremaine McDowell, “The Negro in the Southern Novel Prior to 1850,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 25, no. 4 (1926): 463. McDowell notes that although portraits of black slaves in Recollections outnumber those in other similar novels, they are not central to the plot and take a backseat to the drama of the white slaveowners: “However, elaborate as is this background for the activities of master and mistress, it remains background; in accord with the unspoken but hardly unconscious Southern convention, blacks do not influence the plot.” Dye 128 the earliest known collection of slave songs, although the actual manuscript has been lost.256

Overall, there appears to be a tradition of white women collecting songs and stories from enslaved black people and black domestic workers. In the twentieth century, whether it was from students and schoolteachers in Virginia submitting songs to the

Virginia Folklore Society, a professional folklorist writing about her sister’s southern porch, or a prize-winning author writing from the perspective of a young black woman, collectors turned to black laborers in their own home for folk songs and creative inspiration. To these twentieth collectors, black domestic workers were sites of nostalgia, escapism, and fantasy. In collecting, they engaged in a tradition dating back to the antebellum, perhaps even collecting, as Ruby Pickens Tartt had done, because they were taught to do so by their parents or family members of the older generation. As I explain further in the following section, this tradition was facilitated by the retention of antebellum racial power structures within the white home that carried well into the twentieth century.

Black Songs in White Homes: Plantation Domesticity in the Twentieth Century

That Ruby Pickens Tartt, Dorothy Scarborough, and a good many other white women collectors, were able to collect African American folk music in a manner very similar to white women from nearly a century prior owes much to the consistency of racial hierarchies in the South and of conservative white reactions to societal change in the early twentieth century. Much of the area where Ruby Pickens Tartt was collecting still

256 Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 323. Dye 129 functioned in a manner structurally similar to the antebellum. The Black Belt area was known for its large African American population who still worked on cotton farms, tilling, harvesting, and cleaning the cotton in order to pay off Reconstruction-era debt.257

In Livingston, black residents lived in areas of the city called “quarters,” echoing the name for slave questers on the antebellum plantation.258 Many of the singers that Tartt collected from, such as the McDonalds, lived with the white people for whom they worked as farm laborers and domestic caretakers. Just like it did in slavery times, this racial order was backed by the threat of violence and death to any black person who dared to defy it. The terror of lynching and white supremacist violence was rampant, particularly in the Southern states. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, which documents lynching in America, white people in Alabama lynched 361 (reported)

African Americans.259 Sumter County could claim seven of those lynchings.260 In this section, I explain the legacy of slavery in the twentieth century, in particular how the white plantation-style home came to symbolize comfort, stability, and order for white folks unnerved by social changes and cultural gains made by black folks. I also show how the enduring legacy of the white plantation home factored into recordings made by the

Lomaxes in Livingston, Alabama, during their recording trips.

The Southern home retained its power and its central structure despite many large changes following the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. During this time, white plantation homes largely shifted from a production model, where a large part of the

257 Wade, The Beautiful Music All Around Us, 155. 258 Wade, 158. 259 Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” 2017, https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/. 260 Equal Justice Initiative. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Supplement: Lynchings by County, 2nd ed., 2. Dye 130 land was used to grow food, to a consumption model, where food was largely brought in and the land was either sold or used to grow cash crops. Additionally, many formerly enslaved people and their descendants migrated north and moved to cities, and an urban

“New Negro” entrepreneurial and intellectual class began to gain social and cultural prominence. Amidst all of this change, many white Southern women responded by framing the white Southern home as a totem of stability and continuity with the old way of life. Key to this framing was an emphasis on the black domestic worker as a symbol of a well-run household and of loving relationships between black workers and their white employers. As historian Grace Hale writes, “Thus even as segregation increasingly became policy in the late-nineteenth century South, the white home continued as a site of racial mixing through the employment of African American domestic labor. The white home became a central site for the production and reproduction of racial identity precisely because it remained a space of integration within an increasingly segregated world.”261

The mammy figure in particular came to symbolize an idealized antebellum-era racial order of paternalizing white control and loving black subservience, a phenomenon reflected in the emphasis on mammies described in the previous section. The early twentieth century saw a resurgence in art and culture celebrating the “faithful slave,” most notably the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s attempt to erect a monument to the “faithful colored mammies of the South” in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial.262

Historian Micki McElya notes that white women in particular employed a variety of

261 Hale, Making Whiteness, 94. 262 Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2007), 116. Dye 131 tactics to keep their black domestic workers in a position similar to that of the antebellum slave, including paying them in clothing, offering lodging food and visits to doctors in place of payment, and reacting with suspicion when black domestic workers chose to

“live out” in their own homes rather than provide “live in” care to the white families they worked for.263 White people in Athens, Georgia, even proposed a Black Mammy

Memorial Institute, devoted to “industrial and moral training” of black youth in preparation for their lives as domestic workers in white households.264 Retaining the mammy figure in the twentieth century was an attempt to keep a racial order of black servitude and white control, and the home controlled by a white mistress was the central site where this order would be maintained.

Domesticity has historically dominated women’s writing and culture as a way to assert control over internal matters during times of external unrest. Amy Kaplan writes that from the 1830s to the 1850s—a period that saw Indian removal, the nation’s first prolonged foreign war, and a doubling of national borders—women writers paid renewed interest to the care and keeping of their homes.265 For households that enslaved laborers, or those who relied on low-wage hired black workers after emancipation, the focus on domesticity invariably centered on those laborers. In his 1926 study, “The Negro in the

Southern Novel Prior to 1850,” Tremaine McDowell notes that the invention of the cotton gin and the power loom in the 1820s increased slaveholders’ interest in maintaining the institution slavery—many who had excused slavery now actively defended it. Perhaps due to the increasing demands on their time and their bodies due to

263 McElya, 222–27. 264 McElya, 217–19. 265 Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 584. Dye 132 increased cotton production, enslaved people began to make more conscious efforts towards freedom. McDowell writes, “It was during and in part of this quickening of sectional feeling that the South began to write novels. Inevitably, the slave had a place in this new fiction, and it is here that a study of the negro in the Southern novel becomes possible.”266

In the early twentieth century, the phenomenon repeated itself, with white writers and audiences expressing interest in music and literature that either glorified slavery times or rested on an idea of the black person as tragic slave figure. As Hale writes, “the slave body may have been emancipated, but representations of slavery had never been more popular or profitable.”267 Although Slave Songs of the United States sold few copies in its first 1867 printing, demand for the volume in the first decades of the twentieth century resulted in a second edition reprinting, released the same year as Peterkin’s Pulitzer win.

Ruby Pickens Tartt’s song collecting work reflects both the interest in black cultural expression and the central role of the home in maintaining an antebellum racial order. In the Lomax recordings, too, Tartt’s home plays a central role: many recordings were made there, the house was framed as a particularly good place for recordings, and some singers are strongly represented by their working relationship to Ruby Pickens Tartt. As such, the

Lomax recordings become a part of the act of manifest domesticity. Tartt’s home was considered by these folklorists In a letter to Lomax, Tartt framed her house on Baldwin

Hill as a natural place for collecting black songs, indeed even one where singers might perform their best, writing, “We can have the negros sing out here however, and take care of the mike (generous, isn’t it?), because I believe they’ll do better work where they feel

266 McDowell, “The Negro in the Southern Novel Prior to 1850,” 458. 267 Hale, Making Whiteness, 52. Dye 133 at home.”268 Lomax’s field notes show that the recording team sometimes travelled to black churches and the homes of some singers, but suggest that recordings of Doc Reed,

Vera Hall, and Jesse Allison were made at Tartt’s home.269

It was not just in the recordings of black singers where Tartt centralized her own home, in a recording of Tartt herself singing she does the same. In November 1940,

Ruby Pickens Tartt sang the African American hide-and-seek song, “All Hid,” for the

Lomaxes’ microphone. At the end of the recording, a listener can hear Tartt commenting that she had learned the tune from Bessie, the nurse of her daughter, Fannie Pickens.

The Lomaxes notes consistently frame Ruby Pickens Tartt as a plantation mistress exemplar, who, like Julia Peterkin, carried out her role so well that it was noticed and celebrated by her black laborers. When John and Ruby Lomax visited Tartt again in

1941, Tartt appears to have expressed her Southern hospitality with a display of plantation mistress mastery that included having singer Vera Hall over to Tartt’s house to prepare food and sing for Tartt and her guests. Still mourning the death of daughter who had died several days earlier, Vera Hall nevertheless served Tartt’s out-of-town white guests and entertained them with her singing. John Lomax wrote in his travel notes that

Hall came “readily,” casting Hall as a faithful, appreciative worker. In reality, Hall may not have felt that refusing Tartt was an option, given that her family had long worked for

Tartt’s family and that she had been involved with the Pickens family since she was a young girl.

268 Ruby Pickens Tartt to John Lomax, February 3, 1939. RPT. Series 4, Box 24, Folder FF, Item 1. Emphasis mine. 269 Lomax and Lomax, “1939 Southern Recording Trip Fieldnotes,” 160. “Looking about her as if she [Vera Hall] thought that Mrs. Tartt’s yard would be a very good place to find hiding places, she started off…” Dye 134

Perhaps the most striking examples of Tartt collecting folk songs from her workers are the recordings of Hettie Godfrey, Tartt’s maid, who was in her mid-thirties when she was recorded by the Lomaxes. In the same year that Tartt made her recording of “All

Hid” for the Lomaxes, Hettie Godfrey recorded her version of the same song, the only recording of her in which she sings solo. On the track, Godfrey sings in a high soprano, and the words and rhythm of her “All Hid” are so markedly different from the version

Tartt sang that without the “all hid” refrain one might not guess they were versions of the same song. In a photograph taken of her on the steps of Tartt’s home, which is the only photograph of her in the Library of Congress’ Lomax collection, Hettie Godfrey appears in her maid’s uniform. She may have been interrupted from her work to sing for the microphone.

Given Godfrey’s role as a worker in Tartt’s house during the time of recording, it may be that certain recordings were made with her out of convenience. Hettie Godfrey is also credited as a chorus singer alongside Doc Reed and Jesse Allison in “Jordan Deep an’

Jordan Wide,” a baptizing song. Her appearance on only one of the many recordings made of the other two singers is curious and suggests that Godfrey may have been pulled away from her domestic labors to fill in as a background singer on one tune. Did she know Reed and Allison outside of this encounter? Had they ever sung together before?

Taking the singers out of a context in which they may have sung these tunes on their own time, and placing them all in the home of a white woman—for whom several had served as domestic laborers—in fact obscured the cultural context of this music and re-centers the white home as a site of black music-making.

Dye 135

Black Voices, White Translations

Not only was the home considered a prime site for white women to collect black songs and stories, but white women often saw their role as collectors and transcribers as an artistic venture in itself. Like Julia Peterkin considered the role of the plantation mistress in a well-functioning plantation, white women collectors often inserted themselves into the folk traditions they collected by making musical adaptations, creative transcriptions of oral tales, and fantastical narratives surrounding real collected songs. To white audiences, it was these adaptations that turned the collected materials into an artistic product worthy of white consumption.270 This section will focus on the ways that white audiences and the white woman collector herself were centralized in her work with black folklore.

To white society, white women translating black songs and stories was framed as benevolent and progressive. In this way, the song collecting tradition was just one of many activities through which a white woman might uphold her societal role as a nurturing, moral guide for the nation. Through a white woman’s compassionate ear, and her artistic touch, audiences claimed, a reader might gain some moral benefits. An excellent example of this is seen in a dedication to Ruby Pickens Tartt published by The

Primrose Club, a woman’s club in Livingston. The Primrose dedication commented on the societal good her writing accomplished, describing Ruby Pickens Tartt as a necessary interlocutor whose faithful translation contained a sympathetic understanding of black folks that might drift from the page and embed itself into the reader

270 This is very similar to the way Annabel Morris Buchanan’s folk compositions were described as turning “mere historical documents” into “works of art.” See Ch. 2. Dye 136

The sympathy and understanding she has for her Negro character is so true and so vital that it is carried over to the reader and produces in him a better understanding. The social value to be found in Mrs. Tartt’s work grows out of this greater sympathy and understanding between the two races, effected by the character of the Negro himself. This effect is partly because of the author’s method. She lets the Negro speak for himself. After she has created the atmosphere and the background, the Negro is allowed to tell his own story. At times this story may suggest the great responsibility resting upon the white man of the South in his relation to the Negro.271

Here the Primrose Club credits Tartt’s sympathetic view, as well as her ability to craft an

“atmosphere,” as the primary factor giving the work social value. As the dedication claims, Tartt’s control over the environment included control over her black subjects: she

“lets” them speak, and “allow(s)” them to tell their own story. With this view, the

Primrose Club echoed Ruby Pickens Tartt asserting to John Lomax that the singers would

“do better work” at Baldwin Hill, “where they feel at home.”272 This sort of careful control over the environment, the Primrose Club claims, was not just good for storytelling, but was in fact a model for all white society to emulate when interacting with black folks. Their perspective aligned the way white elites in the twentieth century, particularly in the South, viewed their role in handling “the Negro problem,” or the

“problem” created when black former slaves and their descendants rejected antebellum models of servitude and sought fair pay and different job opportunities. That perspective also echoed that of anti-abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century who argued that the plantation environment actually protected and supported enslaved people, who, they

271 Primrose Club, Article about Ruby Pickens Tartt, n.d. RPT, Series 3, Folder C, Item 8. Emphasis mine. 272 Ruby Pickens Tartt to John Lomax, February 3, 1939. RPT. Series 4, Box 24, Folder FF, Item 1. Dye 137 argued, would not be able to survive and thrive on their own. In all of these arguments lies the assumption that white control is necessary, even beneficial, to black survival.

Of course, white translators of black songs and stories got more than pride in the

“social value” of their work; they got artistic recognition and the money that came with it.

Julia Peterkin’s Pulitzer for Scarlet Sister Mary is one extremely notable example of this sort of recognition. Ruby Pickens Tartt, too, was recognized as an artist by John Lomax, and was offered money for her artistic work. In a letter to Tartt, John Lomax encouraged her to send him more stories that she had transcribed from the storyteller Rich Amerson, writing, “He’s got the it, Mrs. Tartt, that would go over, even with the Saturday Evening

Post, which pays from $500 up. And you have the art, I hope, to extract his best. […] I’d be willing to pay him for his time (through you). And the story when finished will be yours. I’ll keep all you want me to. I know I can sell it for cash money and that money will be yours.” Here too Tartt is positioned as a necessary interlocutor, and a figure of authority over Amerson; he gets paid an unspecified amount through Tartt, making her his employer, while she gets ultimate ownership of his story. Here too, Tartt’s art is framed as key to the success of the story. Lomax’s language of “extract[ing] his best” likens Amerson to crude material that needs to be “refined” through the white woman’s translation skills in order to become valuable to a publication with a large white readership.

This practice of white translation of black folk songs and stories was not unique to the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, Lucy McKim Garrison, an editor of

Slave Songs of the Unites States, the first published collection of African American music, collected black songs and translated some collected songs as voice and piano Dye 138 arrangements. A white woman from Philadelphia, Lucy began collecting black folk songs in the Georgia Sea Islands while on an abolitionist trip with her father, James McKim.

Slave Songs of the United States was the first major compilation of black folk songs to include musical notation along with lyrics. Of the three editors of Slave Songs of the

United States, McKim was the only practicing musician.273 Dena Epstein writes that

McKim’s musical ability and sustained enthusiasm were of vital necessity in bringing

Slave Songs to fruition. Along with her husband, Wendell Garrison, McKim corresponded and coordinated with a large and diverse group of collectors whose submitted songs made up a large percentage of the volume.274

McKim Garrison’s musical knowledge gave her an authoritative position to speak to specific musical characteristics of Negro spirituals, which she demonstrated in a 1862 article, “Songs of the Port Royal ‘Contrabands’.”275 In the article, McKim noted the call and response technique and the “curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals,” which seemed to her “almost impossible” to notate in a standard European score. Despite recognizing the difficulty one might have translating the spirituals, McKim attempted just that in two voice and piano arrangements of the songs, “Poor Rosy, Poor Gal,” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” published later that year.276 These arrangements are described by Dena Epstein as reflective of, “a gifted amateur who had heard the song in its natural surroundings and tried to reproduce it with fidelity and sympathy.”277 Epstein also notes the “unpretentious piano accompaniment,”

273 Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 314. 274 Epstein, 319. 275 Epstein, 260. 276 Epstein, 261. 277 Epstein, 262. Dye 139 which mimics a banjo in “Poor Rosy,” and performance directions for a unison chorus of men and women, which differs from earlier arrangements of Negro spirituals that translated the tunes into a four-part chorus.

However sympathetic or faithful the translation, McKim’s two adaptations of the spirituals remain translations for white ears and reflect the desire of Northern whites to assimilate Southern black music into European musical forms. While those who praised the work of Slave Songs were more sympathetic listeners than those who refused to hear

African American folk music as music at all, their sympathy was based on an idea of

Southern black culture as less developed than white culture or Northern black culture, and a conviction that popular music would soon wipe out knowledge of black folk songs passed along through oral tradition. Charlotte Forten, an African American woman from

Philadelphia who joined the abolitionist crew in the Sea Islands, noted that although she enjoyed teaching “John Brown’s Body” and “Sound the Loud Timbrel,” a hymn by

Thomas Moore, she worried that teaching these new tunes to freed slaves would overtake their knowledge of the spirituals, which she considered, “poor in comparison.”278

Sympathetic ears also assumed that black folks in the South simply needed to be assimilated into white society through education. A Northern visitor to Beaufort in 1866 felt discouraged when witnessing black children performing a ring shout, “thinking how much we had to do to bring them up to the level of our educated classes of the colored people in the free states,” adding, “Thank God, that under these embruted faces there lies the unextinguished soul!”279 McKim’s translation of African American folk tunes into voice and piano arrangements are thus part of this assimilationist fantasy, an attempt to

278 Epstein, 300. 279 Epstein, 282. Dye 140 civilize or domesticate the tunes by translating them into a form more intelligible to white listeners and performers. Her piano imitation of banjo strumming in “Poor Rosy” created a version of the tune that would be familiar to white teachers, one which they could play in their classrooms and in their homes. These arrangements essentially offered a way for the educated white Northerner to hear the “unextinguished soul” of the Southern freedmen by showing that a music that many considered too foreign and noisy to be intelligible could be redeemed through translation into European forms.

These examples of white translation of black folk songs and stories in the nineteenth and twentieth century show that, although ostensibly about black culture and expression, the works in fact reflect white womanhood, particularly that of the white woman author. Writing on Julia Peterkin, literature scholar Nghana tamu Lewis maintains that Peterkin’s novels, while taking black characters as their subjects, ultimately center on Peterkin’s own whiteness and experience as a white woman. The moment in which Peterkin realizes her role within a system that denies her subjects their humanity, yet chooses to maintain that system for her own personal and professional benefit, Lewis writes, confirms her white womanhood as the real subject of her work and

“underscores her strategic conscription in the myth of (white) Southern Womanhood.”280

Troubled by an unease struggle to ‘humanize’ her black subjects while also benefitting from their proscription, Peterkin’s writing reveals the contradiction in her endorsement of the very material conditions that deprived black Americans of equal opportunity and protection under the law well into the latter half of the twentieth century.281

280 tamu Lewis, “The Rhetoric of Mobility, the Politics of Consciousness,” 595. 281 tamu Lewis, 590. Dye 141

Lewis’ framing can be mapped onto work of white women collecting black folk songs, and helps to illuminate the centrality of white womanhood in their projects. Written to appeal to the white readership of the Saturday Evening Post, for example, or to be used by the Northern teachers in the antebellum period, the translations of black folk songs and stories reflect the interest white society had in maintaining a racial order and a view of black folks as subservient to white folks, assimilable to white culture, and unthreatening to white control. These works also centralize whiteness, and imagine white listeners as being enhanced, or finding themselves and their place in society, through their association with the culture of the people who labored for their families. Some particularly revealing examples in Dorothy Scarborough’s work, and in Ruby Pickens

Tartt’s archived writings, occur when the collector reflects on herself in relation to the work and to the black workers around her. Early on in “From a Southern Porch” the white narrator, a stand-in for Scarborough herself, imagines herself becoming more herself as the boundaries between herself and the “natural” world around her begin to blur:

Out here in the open world, I am all things of nature. I am that humming-bird, shaking the world with my whirring wings; I am that puppy leaping with winy life; I am that darkey in the battered hat riding down the road; I am that pig grunting in sensuous peace in the pen by the stable, more than half in love with easeful life; I am that slanting sunbeam down which the gold motes dance. Out here life is so abounding, so spontaneous, that one body cannot hold all of its vitality. I am alive as never before, yet steeped in a heavenly laziness.282

282 Scarborough, From a Southern Porch, 20–21. Emphasis mine. Dye 142

Here the white narrator imagines a poor black worker, “that darkey in the battered hat,” as one of many elements of nature, akin to a grunting pig or a gold mote of light. This framing positions the black worker not as a subjective human being but as a part of the background that surrounds the white woman and gives her life. Throughout the story, the white woman narrator is the one that the reader is meant to identify with, and the

“genuine negro folks songs” within it are not the subject of the work but rather part of a larger atmosphere meant to be enjoyed by, and incorporated into, the white central character’s life.

For Ruby Pickens Tartt, her enthusiasm for collecting black folk-songs, tales, and games fit the “artistic temperament” with which other white Livingston residents characterized her. Tartt was self-aware of the reputation as a provocateur she garnered by her frequent associations with black workers, and she wore it as a badge of honor. In an autobiographical sketch, Tartt proudly and defiantly recalled being the subject of gossip after being seen playing “stoopin’ on the window, wind the ball” with a young black girl named Sallie Anne and her friends. In the account, Tartt claims, she told her white friends that they didn’t know what they were missing out on, then went on to muse about the limited options afforded to her and others in her position. “Practically anything one may do which is a bit different,” she wrote, “is regarded as a threat to the established order of society.” She continued, framing her deviation from societal norms as a benefit to that society. “At least in a town where one day flows imperceptibly into another; as my old friend Brown of long ago pointed out, I have ‘given the people something to talk about’.

And if giving enjoyment is part of the game, then in a certain form of civic self approbation, not entirely extinct in Livingston, I feel I too have made a contribution for Dye 143 which I am glad.”283 What Tartt does not acknowledge is that although a “regarded as a threat” to the established order of things, her actions were not seen as threatening enough to incur any sort of severe punishment or censorship. Indeed, they appear to have gained her some social clout and a distinct position relative to her white peers. While a black

Alabaman might fear violent or even deadly repercussions should any of their actions be

“regarded as a threat,” Ruby Pickens Tartt maintained her standing as an accepted member of white society. Tartt’s rebellion, while shocking to some white folks, was in fact well within socially acceptable behaviors for white women and was seen as an interesting tidbit of gossip rather than a serious infraction.

While Tartt’s association with black workers was an event worthy of gossip, her translations were worthy of praise for their role in maintaining a racial order centered on the domestic structures of the antebellum home. All of her collecting, translating, and publishing of black songs and stories operated entirely within the white sphere of influence and control, and Ruby, while deviating slightly from white norms, never relinquished control or seriously threatened the racial order of white power and control.

As such, Ruby Pickens Tartt and other collectors translating their collecting work into literary works and musical pieces in fact offered a model of benevolent, charitable mistresshood stemming from an antebellum tradition but still, as they displayed, relevant and accessible in the twentieth century.

Conclusion

283 Ruby Pickens Tartt, A personal story, RPT, Series 2, Box 1, Folder B, Item 1. Dye 144

For her part, Ruby Pickens Tartt took some meaningful actions aimed at equality. She argued for voting rights for black citizens, and she got the city to install benches along the route to Livingston for laborers traveling to the city from the black neighborhoods in the county. In her later life as a librarian, she gave books to black children out the back door of the library. However, as much as she loved rattling up white people by associating with black folks, she still conceded to the norms of twentieth century segregation, especially when they involved her home and her hired black help. In Carl

Carmer’s tribute to Tartt, in which he called her “my most unforgettable character,” the writer described a vignette in the elderly Ruby Pickens Tartt’s home. When Tartt and her black cook, Lizzie Castle, would watch television together, Castle would sit in the dining room, while Tartt sat in the living room. Both women could see the television, but Castle was positioned in such a way that she would be out of sight should Ruby receive any visitors. According to Carmer, the two women joked about this set-up, and called it their

“Mason-Dixon line.”284

Tartt continued collecting from black hired help until her death in 1974. An article in the Sumter County Journal from July 4, 1990, includes a quote from historian Alan

Brown, who says, “Ruby Pickens Tartt was adding to it [the collection], even when she was in the nursing home…she would have the black attendants come in and sing a song for her and she would take notes.”285 At Ruby Pickens Tartt’s funeral, a group of black singers, lead by Dock Reed, sang a tribute. Among them was Mildred Dobson, the daughter of Lizzie Castle. For a woman whose earliest memories of black folk music take

284 Carl Carmer, “Miss Ruby, My most unforgettable character,” RPT, Series 3, Box 1, Folder C, Item 3. 285 Sumter County Journal, “Searching files of county folklorist reveals colorful life, era,” July 4, 1990. SFD, D1, Folder 66. Julia Tutwiler Library, Livingston, Alabama. Dye 145 place in the cotton field listening to black sharecroppers, being laid to rest by the voice of the daughter of her cook seems like a poetic end.

This chapter has identified a tradition of “manifest domesticity” involving the collection of black folk songs and stories, particularly for the purpose of being translated into a piece of fiction or a musical adaptation aimed at a white audience. White women like Ruby Pickens Tartt, Dorothy Scarborough, and Julia Peterkin, continued that tradition in to the twentieth century. They did so as part of a larger cultural effort on the part of whites to reinscribe the white home, with black laborers contained within it, as a pillar of stability at a period of time that saw shifting cultural power and the rise of a new black intelligentsia and entrepreneurial class. The process of collecting black folk songs within the home and using the collected material as the basis for the collector’s own creative works was an act of domestication as Amy Kaplan understands it: “we think of domesticity not as a static condition but as the process of domestication, which entails conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien. […]Through the process of domestication, the home contains within itself those wild or foreign elements that must be tamed; domesticity not only monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage but also regulates traces of the savage within itself.”286 Through their work, white women collectors both domesticated the “foreign” by symbolically placing “authentic” black culture within the confines of the white home, but they also “regulate[d] traces of the savage withing [themselves]” by framing a brutal racial order within their own homes

(one that consistently made antebellum slaveowners and post-Reconstruction whites paranoid and nervous) as innocent, natural, and mutually beneficial.

286 Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 582. Dye 146

Many scholars studying black folk song collection by whites readily admit that white collectors like John and Alan Lomax held conservative ideas of black musical authenticity, most often rooting that authenticity in antebellum slavery times and seeking out performances in places, like prisons, that they thought might preserve the condition of those performances, unspoiled by popular music on the radio287 Music historian Erich

Nunn has suggested that these folklorists held romantic views of segregation and the color line, views which actually belied a fear of integration. He writes, “beneath this idea that authentic blackness can be preserved or recovered through near-absolute segregation lies an anxiety about the collapsing of racial difference that might otherwise follow from any breach of the color line.”288 However, while this scholarship often identifies the plantation as a folkloric ideal, in all too often treats the plantation as a relic of the past, ignoring the enduring legacy of plantation domesticity and the ongoing attempts, largely by white women, to maintain the structures of the antebellum plantation within the twentieth century white home. The case of Ruby Pickens Tartt as a Lomax informant suggests that it wasn’t so much segregation or isolation from whites that white collectors desired, but rather a clear racial hierarchy idealized in the antebellum plantation. Luckily for the Lomaxes, they could tap into a tradition of song collecting that white women had been undertaking for at least a century.

287 Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination, 82. 288 Nunn, 83. Dye 147

Chapter 4: Wahine ‘Ilikea: Helen Heffron Roberts and Colonial Ethnography in Hawaii

On July 1, 1923, Helen Heffron Roberts departed from New York for Honolulu to collect songs for the Hawaiian Legend and Folklore Commission of the Territory of Hawaii. At the time of her departure, the Territory of Hawaii was barely a quarter-century old, the lands belonging to the Hawaiian monarchy having been annexed into the Unites States in

1898, following the 1893 overthrow of Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani, which saw the

United States using military force against a friendly nation in support of an insurgency championed by a small number of haole (foreign) politicians and businessmen. As a result of this trip, Roberts gave the Hawaiian Legend and Folklore Commission 152 recorded chants, as well as two reports on Hawaiian music and chant that included transcribed chants, organological descriptions of Hawaiian instruments, and speculations on the origins and development of this musical culture.

To the Hawaiians, Roberts might have been considered a wahine ‘ilikea, or fair- skinned woman. Hawaiian music lovers today would likely recognize the term from the title of a well-known song by Dennis Kamakahi, one of the most influential slack-key guitar players to come out of the “Hawaiian Renaissance” of the 1970s. In Kamakahi’s song, the “wahine ‘ilikea” is a metaphor for white clouds over the island of Moloka’i, clouds that bring rain and life to the dry leeward side of the island.289 Unlike Kamakahi’s wahine, however, Roberts’ mission did not have her bringing life to a dry region. Indeed,

Hawaiians in their fifties or older might have remembered the coronation celebration and birthday jubilee of King Kalākaua, the “Merrie Monarch” who championed Hawaiian

289 “Wahine Ilikea,” accessed July 5, 2020, https://www.huapala.org/Wa/Wahine_Ilikea.html. Dye 148 cultural practices as a way of asserting a Hawaiian national identity against scheming

American businessmen, several of whom attempted to assassinate him in 1889.290 At

Kalākaua’s jubilees, Hawaiians would have seen musicians chanting and performing ancient temple hula and new meles in the king’s honor, sometimes as many as sixty dancers performing at the same time. Now they saw a white woman, with European musical training but no knowledge of Hawaiian, coming to record the songs of a culture that the American government assured was quickly dying out.

Helen Heffron Roberts was born in Chicago on June 12, 1888. As it was for many girls growing up at the turn of the century, music was a central part of her childhood. She began studying the piano at age seven and at continued her musical studies at the Chicago

Musical College after graduating from the prestigious girl’s boarding school Monticello

Seminary in Godfrey, Illinois, in 1907.291 At Chicago Musical College, Roberts studied under Ernesto Consolo, Felix Borowski, Adolf Bruning, and Adolf Weidig. After graduating in 1909, Roberts worked several jobs as a music teacher. In 1910 she taught private lessons for a family in Mexico, and from 1911 through part of 1913 she taught piano in Uvalde, Texas. She then continued her piano education at the American

Conservatory of Music in Chicago, studying under Victor Garwood, and after graduation spent several winters teaching piano at the Kansas State Manual Training School.292

290 Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story, by Hawaii’s Queen (Honolulu, Hawaii: Mutual Publishing, 1990), 200. 291 When Roberts attended the seminary, it was named Monticello Female Seminary. The school dropped “female” in 1907, when Roberts graduated, but remained an all-women’s school until it closed in 1971. Charlotte J. Frisbie, “Helen Heffron Roberts (1888-1985): A Tribute,” Ethnomusicology 33, no. 1 (1989): 98; John J. Dunphy, “A Brief History of Monticello College in Godfrey, Illinois,” Medium, January 23, 2019, https://medium.com/@johnjdunphy/a-brief-history-of-monticello-college-in-godfrey-illinois- c2109137d6ff. 292 Frisbie, “Helen Heffron Roberts (1888-1985),” 98. Dye 149

Roberts expected to become a concert pianist, yet abandoned that dream because her hands could not span a full octave.293

Roberts was trained as an anthropologist by Franz Boas, earning a master’s degree in

Anthropology in 1919. Although Boas supported Roberts’ interest in music, her anthropological training was not specifically related to music. She instead wrote a thesis on material culture, titled, “Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding

Region,” which was published in 1928. Boas, however, encouraged Roberts to pursue study of “primitive music,” telling her that if she combined her anthropological training with her earlier music education, she would have a corner of the anthropological field all to herself.294 As such, her work immediately following her degree was primarily making transcriptions and analyses of collected folk music. Roberts’ ability to bring musical expertise to her anthropological work seems to be in large part due to her education as a young woman; Boas’ comment about cornering the field speaks to the rarity of such a combination in a field where women were in the minority. Roberts is now remembered as an early pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology, but it is helpful to consider her musical training separate from her anthropological training, both for the sake of avoiding anachronism and in order to maintain clarity about the separate sources of knowledge that

Roberts brought to her ethnographic trip to Hawaii. Although granted the opportunity to carry out this ethnography due to her degree in anthropology, Roberts was specifically drawing on a significant background of piano training and experience as a piano teacher when transcribing and analyzing Hawaiian music.

293 Frisbie, 98n2. 294 Frisbie, 99. Dye 150

This chapter thus frames the work Roberts did in Hawaii as deeply indebted to her extensive piano training. In this respect, I connect Roberts to two other white women ethnographers, Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore, who also studied the music of indigenous populations in the crosshairs of American imperialist expansion. Ignorant of the musical and cultural practices of the populations they studied, and writing for a primarily white academic and popular audience, these women used the music and culture they were intimately familiar with as a method of translation and a benchmark by which to make judgements and analytical claims about the music they documented. This chapter also highlights the darker consequences of using that sort of background knowledge.

Roberts’ studies show her repeatedly making claims that Hawaiians and Hawaiian music were “undeveloped” because their use of melody did not align with the sort of music she grew up studying and performing. In this respect, she mirrored Fletcher and Densmore, who added chords to native melodies and encouraged symphonic adaptations of Indian songs while the original recordings were sequestered away and not taught in Indian schools. These ethnographers maintained a hierarchy in their minds; the musical practices of indigenous people was “primitive” and destined to die away, while the collected music would live on as objects for white consumption and adaptation. In this chapter, I maintain that such work was a tool of colonialist, imperialist power, intrinsically tied to military efforts aimed at expanding the reach of the United States government. Ethnographic work could be a “soft power” that would prove the inferior cultural development of a target population, which could be used to justify colonial occupation and an imperialist military takeover. Such was the case in Hawaii. Dye 151

Roberts’ ethnographic work mirrors and contributed to a characterization of

Hawaiians and the Hawaiian islands as welcoming, bountiful, and available for American consumption, a characterization peddled by mainland whites in order to sell America’s annexation of the islands to the American public. Hula historian Adria Imada has convincingly argued that hula circuits—which she defines as “popular tours of hula performers that crisscrossed both the Atlantic and the Pacific, performing for largely

Euro-American audiences in Western metropolitan centers, rural outposts, and small towns”—were fashioned in order to portray an image of Hawaii and Hawaiians as passive, hospitable, and sexually available.295 Euro-American promoters cast only young women as hula performers, and reviewers described the shows as erotic displays of inviting exoticism.296 While Roberts’ study is largely free of such gendered, orientalist characterizations, in this chapter I identify an instance where she claims there will be

“plenty to enjoy” in Hawaiian poetry when those with knowledge of its kaona, or second meaning, inevitably (to Roberts) died out. This statement reveals the salvage mentality behind Roberts’ ethnography and an optimism that Hawaii and Hawaiian culture would provide gifts to American overthrowers after its people were assimilated or annihilated.

Like Imada, I view such statements as part of the American imperialist project.

At the same time, white government officials in Hawaii sought to prove that Native

Hawaiians were incapable of self-governance, echoing colonial practices that had been used against Native Americans for several centuries prior to Hawaii’s annexation. As

Hawaii historian Ronald Williams Jr. has observed, prominent whites in Hawaii were

295 Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 5. 296 Imada, 68. Dye 152 fearful that America’s overthrow of the monarchy and annexation of the territory would lead to broader participation of the populace in governance, threatening their oligarchic rule. In response, Williams writes, “white leaders sought to craft a race-centric narrative that posited native incompetence as an answer to why democracy should not prevail in an

American territory.”297 Hawaii’s first territorial legislature, largely native-led, was characterized as incompetent, ineffective and shallow in public literature, although actual records of the legislature reveal a “competent, prepared, and engaged native leadership addressing foundational concerns of their constituents.”298 Roberts’ work echoed these efforts. Her analysis of Hawaiian music concludes that melodic and rhythmic aspects were “rudimentary,” “simple,” or “rough,” and maintains surety that many aspects of the music were quickly dying out in the face of modern Western culture. This chapter thus puts Roberts’ flawed analysis of Hawaiian music within the larger frame of white supremacist American imperialism, arguing that her work contributed to a racist idea of

Hawaiians that was used to justify American oppression and domination.

I argue that Roberts, like her colleagues recording the music of continental American

Indians, used “tonality as a colonizing force.” I borrow this term from Kofi Agawu, who characterized the adaptation of African music into western forms as “musical violence of a very high order, a violence whose psychic and psychological impacts remain to be properly explored.”299 Citing recent examples of African popular and art music—

Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Nigerian composer Joshua Uzoigwe, and the 1970s

297 Ronald Williams, Jr., “Race, Power, and the Dilemma of Democracy: Hawai’i’s First Territorial Legislature, 1901,” Hawaiian Journal of History 49, no. 1 (2015): 3, https://doi.org/10.1353/hjh.2015.0017. 298 Williams, Jr., 3. 299 Kofi Agawu, “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa,” in Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 337. Dye 153

Ghanaian band Wulomei–Agawu argues that the introduction of European tonality

(accompanied by a colonizing military and political force) actually “underdeveloped”

African tonal possibilities in the realms of creation and reception.300 In this chapter, I do not make broad claims of loss as Agawu does; rather, in my conclusion, I show ways that

Hawaiian music and culture have consistently adapted, resisted, and endured colonial and imperialist efforts, arguing that Roberts’ failure to understand several key aspects of

Hawaiian musical culture ultimately made her a less effective colonialist tool. I do, however, frame the actions of Roberts and other white women ethnographers of indigenous populations as an intentional colonizing force. I argue that their knowledge of and skill in western musical language and forms, skills connected to their white womanhood and acquired outside of their ethnographic training, was a primary weapon through which these ethnographers assisted U.S imperial expansion.

This chapter’s first section examines Roberts’ studies of Hawaiian music made from her ethnographic trip to Hawaii, documenting the studies through which Roberts gleaned a racial idea of the Hawaiian people and their culture, the conclusions Roberts made about Hawaiian musicality and the stage of “cultural development” Hawaiians had reached, and the salvage mindset Roberts employed while studying a culture she was sure would die out. The second section takes a brief look at ethnographers Alice Fletcher and

Frances Densmore, focusing on their treatment of the music of continental American

Indians in order to place Roberts’ work within a larger context of colonial ethnography carried out by white women. To conclude, I examine historical accounts of Hawaiian musicians travelling through the continental United States at the same time that Roberts

300 Agawu, 350. Dye 154 traveled to Hawaii, as well as recent studies of the ways in which Hawaiian cultural knowledge is retained through Hawaiian song and speech, arguing that Hawaiians maintained a strong sense of cultural identity and resistance to colonial forces largely because their musical knowledge was unintelligible and thus inaccessible to colonial ethnographers like Roberts. Such musical knowledge can be seen in Hawaiian protest music from immediately after the overthrow up to the anthems created by the twenty-first century kia’i (protectors) of Mauna Kea.

Salvage Ethnography in the Hawaii Trip

Roberts was not the only white woman to do ethnographic work in Hawaii. Dancer

Vivenne Mader first visited the islands in 1929 to learn hula from Helen Desha Beamer, a

Hawaiian dancer. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Mader began dancing hula under the name “Huapala,” an affectionate Hawaiian term that roughly translates to

“sweetheart.”301 Throughout the 1930s, Mader made phonograph records of hulas and translated dance moves into notations on paper. Wesleyan University’s Special

Collections Library holds Mader’s archived papers, which includes 45rpm and 78rpm records, notated dance moves, and several sheets of tapa barkcloth.302 Martha Beckwith, a Boas-trained anthropologist like Roberts who served as President of the American

Folklore Society from 1922-1923, devoted a substantial portion of her career to Hawaiian folklore. Although she was born in Massachussetts, Beckwith’s family included some

301 “Huapala’s Hulas,” TIME Magazine (TIME USA, LLC, May 3, 1937). 302 Wesleyan Library Special Collections and Archives, “Guide to the Huapala Collection, 1930-1970,” Wesleyan, accessed March 19, 2020, https://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/sca/FAs/hu2001-69.xml. Dye 155 who had been among the first missionaries to the islands.303 Beckwith wrote her doctoral dissertation on the romance of Laieikawai, a nineteenth century newspaper serial by a writer named Haleole. The story was based upon an oral folktale and was reinterpreted as a newspaper serial in an attempt to begin a written Hawaiian literature.304 Beckwith made many trips back to the islands to record folk tales and myths; her work culminated in

Hawaiian Mythology, a large compilation of oral mythology that was published for the

Folklore Foundation of Vassar College.305

Roberts described her knowledge of Hawaiian language and culture as “complete ignorance” in the preface to Ancient Hawaiian Music. However, this did not appear to be a huge problem for Roberts or the Hawaiian Legend and Folklore Commission. Instead, as stated in the preface to Ancient Hawaiian Music, Roberts’ musical abilities and ethnological training rendered her capable in the eyes of the commission to conduct research on a musical culture about which she was entirely ignorant. In other words, by hiring Roberts to document Hawaiian songs instead of a local practitioner, the Hawaiian

Legend and Folklore Commission was announcing that the audience for such a project would primarily be those who shared Roberts’ musical knowledge, and not the Hawaiian people themselves.

Had there been anyone familiar with the Hawaiian language who had the requisite musical training and experience to identify, collect, and reduce to notation the tunes of the old type, and to analyze them with due regard for the requirements of ethnology, it would have been sheer impudence to have attempted the task.

303 Katharine Luomala, “Martha Warren Beckwith. A Commemorative Essay,” The Journal of American Folklore 75, no. 298 (1962): 341, https://doi.org/10.2307/538369. Luomala notes that Beckwith was considered an adopted “cousin” of the islands, a term used to describe those who were descendants of early missionaries. To me, this seems very similar to Virginia residents attempting to trace their lineage back to Virginia’s “first families.” 304 Luomala, 344. 305 Martha Warren Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940). Dye 156

There was, however, no such person available; the need of the investigation was urgent because few old people still live who are capable of furnishing reliable information. An ear capable of noting tones with discrimination should be able to catch the sounds of speech sufficiently to write down texts, while interpreters, if not as satisfactory as the ability to converse, could accomplish the rest.306

Here Roberts writes that the commission’s ideal expert would have been a Hawaiian person trained in Western musical notation and ethnographic practices, or a (presumably white) trained musician and ethnographer who had learned Hawaiian as a part of their studies or prior ethnographic experience. Having found no one who had that highly unlikely combination of experience, Roberts’ preface reveals, the commission decided that ethnographic training and musical abilities were preferable to intimate knowledge of

Hawaiian language and culture. In a study on kaona, the Hawaiian practice of artful double meaning in speech and song, Noelani Arista asserts that Hawaiian linguistics and knowledge are so different from Euro-American premises that they require a distinct methodological apparatus in order to be properly studied and understood.307 Yet Roberts, ignorant as she was of the Hawaiian language and Hawaiian culture more generally, was nevertheless trusted as an expert capable of collecting an accurate representation of

Hawaiian musical culture because of her earlier musical and anthropological training. Her ability to “catch the sounds” of speech and song and then convert them into forms legible to white scholars via musical notation and ethnographic analysis overrode her inability to actually converse with Hawaiians in their own language.

306 Helen Heffron Roberts, Ancient Hawaiian Music, Dover Edition (New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967), 4. 307 Noelani Arista, “Navigating Uncharted Oceans of Meaning: Kaona as Historical and Interpretive Method,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 664. Dye 157

To learn about Hawaiians, Roberts then looked to studies written by other white

European scholars. Contained in her archived papers in the Library of Congress’

American Folklife Center are handwritten and typed excerpts about Hawaiians, pulled from the literature Roberts consulted. Often, these studies had a clear agenda: the authors tried to link Hawaiian culture back to its ancient origin in order to make a racial determination about the Hawaiian people. Abraham Fornander made this effort very obvious when he attempted to argue that Hawaiians had Aryan roots based on a very tenuous connection he drew between Hawaiian and Norse cultures. Roberts typed out this passage from Fornander’s Account of the Polynesian Race in her field notes:

It will be well to bear in mind the peculiar characteristics of the Old Norse mal and the Hawaiian mele inoa. They both recited in metric form the power and glory of dead ancestors as well as of living heroes. As neither Norse nor Polynesian have borrowed from each other, that custom, and its name, of chanting the exploits of the ancestors, must have been a common Aryan trait before even the first separation.308

Another excerpt Roberts took down, written by A. Marques in an article titled “Music in

Hawaii nei,” noted that the author was “struck by the discovery that they were in amny

[sic] cases identical with songs and dances which I had seen or heard in the northern provinces of Africa.” He wrote that “the Arabians chant on one, and sing on two or three notes, and wail their mourning in exactly the same way as the old Hawaiians.”309

Marques concluded that these purported similarities supported Fornander’s argument for

308 Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, Its Origins and Migrations and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People to the Times of Kamehameha I, vol. 3 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & co., ltd., 1885), 232; Helen Heffron Roberts, “Field Notes on Hawaiian Music,” n.d., Helen H. Roberts Papers (AFC 1979/100), HI-70, Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 309 A. Marques, “Music in Hawai’i Nei,” in Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1886, ed. Thomas G. Thrum, vol. 12, A Handbook of Information on Matters Relating to the Hawaiian Islands, Original and Selected, of Value to Merchants, Planters, Tourists and Others (Honolulu: Press Publisher Co., 1886), 55; Roberts, “Field Notes on Hawaiian Music.” Dye 158

Aryan ancestry. Roberts also drew from Stanford-Forsyth’s A History of Music and J.C.

Stobart’s The Glory That Was Greece in her attempts to contextualize Hawaiian music.

Overall, the main question these scholars were after was whether or not Hawaiian culture could be traced back to any of the “great civilizations” of the Western world.

The music Roberts recorded in Hawaii was transcribed in Western notation for

Ancient Hawaiian Music in order to make Hawaiian music “intelligible to the majority of the reading public, already well grounded in [western notation].”310 In her introduction, while she specified that this choice was made in order to facilitate easy translation to an

American audience, she was also quick to dismiss the possibility of using a traditional

Hawaiian method of teaching or translation. “The employment of the modified European system used in this paper must be understood to serve but a single purpose, that of conveying in a practically readable and sufficiently accurate manner the music of a people who have no system of their own.”311 She indicated tonal deflections from the

European chromatic scale, used accidental chromatic signs rather than key signatures, and although she retained measure bars, utilized changing time signatures in order to capture areas where the music did not follow a standard European meter. Although

Roberts appears to have taken great care to translate the music as accurately as she was able, given the constraints of Western notation, using this notational style and maintaining Western classical music as the standard by which Hawaiian music was translated nevertheless lead her to make comparative statements that judges Hawaiian music as less “developed” than European music.312

310 Roberts, Ancient Hawaiian Music, 13. 311 Roberts, 15. 312 A historical study of written musical notation in Hawaii has yet to be written, but would be a helpful contribution to the literature on Hawaiian music. Royalty were educated to read and write sheet music Dye 159

In doing so, Roberts used her musical training to wield an oft-used tool of colonial and imperialist power, marking a culture and a people as different and “undeveloped” due to the perceived dominance of certain musical/cultural elements and the perceived paucity of others. Kofi Agawu has written the central text on scholarly interpretations of

“African music,” noting how the vastly different cultures on the African continent are homogenized under the genre “African,” and in particular how rhythmic structure is widely accepted as the defining feature of this genre. These assumptions about the music of the African continent serve to confirm racist notions about the people of whose culture the music is a part. “That the distinctive qualify of African music lies in its rhythmic structure is a notion so persistently thematized that it has not assumed the status of a commonplace, a topos. And so it is with related ideas that African rhythms are complex, that Africans possess a unique rhythmic sensibility, and that this rhythmic disposition marks them as ultimately different from us.”313 In America, persistent musicological ideas about rhythm as a lesser musical form than harmony or melody, for instance, have contributed to continuing racist bias against African American musical forms throughout the twentieth century and will into the twenty-first. Agawu notes that even African musicologists have bought into this idea, and used it to proclaim deficiencies in other

notation, and the Royal Hawaiian Band would have been playing music from written notation since their inception in 1836. Queen Liliuokalani wrote in her memoirs that “no other composer but myself has ever reduced [Hawaiian songs] to writing.” Liliuokalani was the director of the Kawaiahao Church Choir beginning in 1866, and she composed many songs, the most well-known being “Aloha ‘Oe” and the Hawaiian national anthem, “Hawaii Pono‘i.” While written music, band music, and church choral music would not have been considered “ancient” Hawaiian by ethnographers like Roberts, and would likely be seen in a colonial lens as Western music overtaking Hawaiian music, a critical historical study of written music in Hawaii would hopefully give a more nuanced view of written music that resists simple categorization of Hawaiian/non-Hawaiian and highlights the agency of the Hawaiian people in creating music that reflects their values and vision. Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story, 53; Glen Grant, “Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen: A Voice for Hawaiian Sovereignty,” in Hawaii’s Story, by Hawaii’s Queen (Honolulu, Hawaii: Mututal Publishing, 1990), ix. 313 Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music, Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (New York: Routledge, 2003), 125. Dye 160 areas of the music; African musicologist Kwabena Nketia, for example, has written that rhythmic predominance in African music is the reason for the “lack of melodic sophistication.”314 These assumptions come from “an intellectual space defined by Euro-

American traditions of ordering knowledge,” writes Agawu.315 As such, racist biological assumptions gain power and prestige through their association with “scientistic” methods of analysis, and perpetuate colonial violence against marginalized people and cultures.

Helen Heffron Roberts wielded her colonialist tool by claiming that Hawaiian literature was well-developed, but their music was in a lesser developed stage. Although she cited those like Fornander, who tried to link Hawaiians to an ancient Aryan ancestor,

Roberts was quick to judge the Hawaiians as primitive or underdeveloped in relation to the “great” civilizations, who she held as benchmarks. In a short article titled “Hawaiian

Music,” which Roberts wrote as part of a handbook for Honolulu’s Bernice Pauahi

Bishop Museum—a museum for Hawaiian history and culture that remains one of the foremost authorities on that topic to this day—Roberts praised Hawaiian poetry while simultaneously judging Hawaiian music as underdeveloped in relation to Egyptian and

Moorish graphic arts, and Hawaiian culture at large as “simple.”

Hawaiian music never reached such a degree of development is did the two graphic arts just mentioned [Egyptian and Moorish]. It was evidently side-tracked in some way while self expression travelled far and scaled great heights along literary lines. Seldom have the people of the earth in so simple a stage of culture developed such imagery, such power of description, such sheer beauty of language, for which their lovely islands furnished ample inspiration, as did the Hawaiians in their unwritten but carefully memorized literature, […]316

314 Agawu, 129. 315 Agawu, 130. 316 Helen Heffron Roberts, “Hawaiian Music” (Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, n.d.), Helen H. Roberts Papers (AFC 1979/100), HI-51, Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Dye 161

Here Roberts repeats a colonial assumption of cultural scarcity, where the “development” of one aspect of culture is necessarily at the expense of another, an assumption not shared by Hawaiians, as I will discuss below. Additionally, Roberts’ love for Hawaiian poetry appears to be part of a romanticized view of Hawaii’s landscape; she cites the natural beauty of the islands as a possible explanation for Hawaiian mastery of poetic imagery.

As I discuss in a later section, the view of the Hawaiian islands as lush and pristine was shared and exploited by the burgeoning tourist industry, framed the land as natural, and untouched, and ultimately used to justify America’s annexation of the islands.

Roberts judged the so-called “development” of Hawaiian music based on whether the melodies of Hawaiian music could translate well onto a Western system of notation.

Beyond that, she judged whether the notated tunes of Hawaiian melodies would be considered varied and complex to a Western ear. Excerpts from “Hawaiian Music” show

Roberts using language of scarcity and judging two aspects of hula music, chanted and instrumental, as deficient because both did not employ a wide variety of melody. In the first, Roberts writes that few hula tunes are “really individual” because there isn’t much melodic variation. She also appears to have attempted to school a singer who she deemed

“confused” about the tonal difference between a major or minor third and a perfect fourth.

The paucity of hula tunes which are really individual may be correctly estimated when it is said that most of the tunes are variants of a few melodic ideas, and a number of hula meles may be given by the same person to practically the same melody. The indifference to melody may be judged by the fact that those tunes based on a major or minor third were apt to be confused with those built about the interval of a perfect fourth, and the request for a repetition might result in a shift from one to the other without the singer evincing any consciousness of the fact, nor could he be Dye 162

made to see the difference, in many instances. As long as the words were the same, the rest did not matter.317

Here Roberts’ privileging of melody in the Western sense leads her to make some inaccurate conclusions about Hawaiian peoples’ musicality, ultimately leading her to a misguided and incomplete understanding of Hawaiian music generally. Roberts saw melody in the Western sense, meaning it could be translated onto sheet music notation, which would then serve as the definitive, unchanging version of that tune. To Roberts, if one mele appeared the same as another when translated onto the five-line staff, it was functionally the same tune. Additionally, if a singer didn’t stick to the “same” melody, as translated onto the staff, Roberts was left unsure as to which one was the “correct” version. Hence her conclusion that singers were “confused” and without any

“consciousness” regarding changing melodies, nor could they be “made to see the difference.” What Roberts did not understand was that factors other than melody, as understood in the Western sense, could be driving Hawaiian music, and she did not acknowledge that she might be the one who was “confused.” Roberts does not make any significant attempt to understand and relate the Hawaiian methods for learning and performing sung music that would be helpful for those trying to carry on the tradition.

In contrast, Hawaiian music historian George Kanahele has pointed to performance practice features, such as style, interpretation, and voice quality, that are intrinsic to

Hawaiian music but do not translate onto the written page. He also maintains that one must have a deep understanding of Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian musical practice in order to perform it correctly, writing:

317 Roberts. Dye 163

Let a singer who is not Hawaiian, who was never exposed to Hawai‘i or Hawaiians for any length of time, read a sheet of music of what is considered a Hawaiian song, text in English or Hawaiian, and what happens? The song sounds like any other popular American song. Apart from mispronouncing Hawaiian words, the singer cannot produce that specific musical sound, the voice quality, which will make the song uniquely Hawaiian.318

Here Kanahele acknowledges that the melodic elements of Hawaiian mele, as written on the page, do not capture the entirety of a correct musical performance. Kanahele additionally writes that for Hawaiians, the poetry and the music are intrinsically linked, as poetry was culturally understood to only come to life through music. “Hawaiian words and text are major determinants of such musical elements as voice quality melodic ornamentation, rhythmic pattern, and, more generally, melodic form.”319 Thus, a singer like the ones Roberts recorded, who could not be “made to see the difference” between two notated versions of a tune, may have instead been judging their performance of a mele by how well they were able to interpret the poetic text rather than how well they mimicked the notated tune of an earlier performance.

It should be noted that Roberts and Kanahele essentially agree about the poor ability of Western notation to communicate Hawaiian mele accurately. In his comment about text being a major determinant of musical form, Kanahele is echoing Roberts’ statement,

“As long as the words were the same, the rest did not matter,” but in a manner that reflects a much deeper curiosity about how Hawaiian music works than Roberts had.

Whereas Roberts sees a varied melodic performance as evidence of ignorance or

318 George S. Kanahele, ed., Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979), xxiv. 319 Kanahele, xxiv. Dye 164 disinterest in melody, Kanahele sees a musical practice that values fluidity and uses many different elements of performance practice in order to showcase the performer’s ability to creatively interpret the poetry. Far from “the rest” not “mattering,” though, we can understand through Kanahele that the divide Roberts sees between the poetry and the music simply does not exist for Hawaiians, and her method of documentation fails to accurately capture the music in a manner that would assist continued practice.

Roberts’ assessments of the musicality of Hawaiians based on melody was not limited to sung music. In the Bishop Museum handbook, Roberts commented on the melodic possibilities (or lack thereof) of Hawaiian instruments, and also explicitly ties melodic complexity to whether or not an instrument might be called “truly musical.” In the following excerpt, Roberts imagines a spectrum between “noise” and “music,” making it clear that her definition of “musical” requires tonal variation; drums, with little melodic possibilities, occupy an “intermediate position between noise- and music-making instruments”:

There were a number of instruments, most of which were used in connection with the hula dances, but few of them produced truly musical tones. Some, like the drums, occupied an intermediate position between noise- and music-making instruments. Others, which actually had several tonal possibilities, were very limited in the volume of sound which they could produce, either because of their structure, like the ukeke, the only stringed instrument, or the flute, which was played by air from one nostril.320

Ultimately, Roberts judged the aspects of Hawaiian music, at least those that she was able to conceptualize along Western musical ways of knowing, as reflective of the Hawaiians as a race, particularly in comparison to Euro-American culture. This analytic move will

320 Roberts, “Hawaiian Music.” Dye 165 be familiar to scholars of early twentieth century anthropology and “comparative musicology,” the predecessor to the field of ethnomusicology. In Ancient Hawaiian

Music, this analytic leap demonstrates how Roberts’ musical training, combined with her academic anthropological training, further carried out the mission of the American imperialists who illegally overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii and annexed its lands. In her article for the Bishop Museum handbook, she contrasted the “rudimentary tunes” of the

Hawaiians with “those races who have had the fortune to stumble upon a discovery.”

Their failure to develop along melodic lines beyond rudimentary tunes was merely one of those accidents of history which seems so inexplicable to those races who have had the fortune to stumble upon a discovery, be it musical, mechanical or what not. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that the first steps toward invention are the most difficult by far, and that progress once established gathers momentum as it goes, and to fail to allow for the influence toward stagnation or development resting with the interdicts of court or religious life.321

In this assessment, Roberts takes a paternalizing attitude towards her informants, and maintains white supremacy in her contrast between Hawaiians and fortunate “other races.”322 She views Hawaiians unable to take the difficult “first step” towards developing their music. This view was shared by many white scholars studying non-

321 Roberts. 322She repeated these claims of cultural stagnation in Ancient Hawaiian Music: “The complicated rhythms of olis, about which so much has been said, as it has in the case of much American Indian music, are really, I believe in one sense not complicated at all. They have not been appreciated or studied by their users apart from the text and there is little evidence of more than the simplest play with them. They are merely the transferred rhythms of speech more or less whimsically treated. To prove that any language may be based on a certain set of general laws of rhythm would, naturally, require a much firmer grasp of its principles, with sufficient time to examine quantities of texts, than it would be possible to accomplish in this study of Hawaiian music. The music in itself appears to reveal only the roughest general patterns in the olis, and the simplest rhythmic structures in the hulas, for the Hawaiians were, evidently, only at the beginning of the abstract study of rhythms, not on the heights.” Roberts, Ancient Hawaiian Music, 153. Dye 166 white people and culture. Within the context of the recent American annexation of the

Hawaiian islands, and the ongoing efforts to assimilate Hawaiians into American culture,

Roberts can be understood as an important agent in a larger imperialist project.

Roberts’ mission was one of “ethnographic salvage,” where ethnographers hastily collected the music and traditions of a culture they proclaimed to be dying out. The salvage tradition began in the nineteenth century, wrote anthropologist Jacob Gruber, who coined the term, borne out of an impulse to categorize groups of people and a recognition of “the destructive impact of European civilization on native peoples and their cultures.”323 A salvage mindset drove nineteenth and early twentieth century

American anthropologists, like Roberts’ teacher Franz Boas, to study Native American tribes, and set the parameters of the field of anthropology. It was also one of the primary motivators for many early twentieth century American folklorists studying Appalachian and African-American folk songs. Importantly, Gruber writes, the ethnographic salvage method does not actually remedy colonialism’s destructive impact but has worked in tandem with it.324 A salvage mindset ripples throughout Roberts’ Hawaiian music studies, not only in the comparative methods discussed above but also in her surety that

Hawaiian culture was dying out. “Of the classic types,” she wrote about Hawaiian mele in in the Bishop Museum handbook, “one finds now but a trace, far from beaten paths and revived like dying sparks only occasionally when folk to old and feeble to have the vigor for them are inspired by holiday spirit to a vision of old days.” She concluded with

323 Jacob W. Gruber, “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 72, no. 6 (1970): 1262. 324 Gruber, 1297. Practices of salvage ethnography include an acontextual comparative method encouraged by a detached method of “collecting” a body of data, and a pathology of cultural loss and sense of social disorganization instead of any real experience or investment in the community. Additionally, salvage ethnography does not engage in any actions that would halt ongoing colonialist violence; rather it Dye 167 a proclamation of impending death: “In another decade they will have vanished entirely.”325

Roberts revealed a full recognition of the ongoing effects of Western imperialist presence in Hawaii when she admitted that, despite the title of the study, the chants collected in Ancient Hawaiian Music do not represent true ancient Hawaiian music due to the “breaking down process which is at work of all of the phases of the original Hawaiian culture.”326 However, she did not name the agents responsible for breaking down

Hawaiian culture, likely because doing so would mean implicating her employer in the long history of colonial, imperialist forces who criminalized the Hawaiian language and banned chant and hula due to their supposed immorality. Rather, she obscures the ongoing imperialist actions in Hawaii, and her own role in those actions, by describing kupuna (elders) as “naturally reluctant to part with their treasured lore to a stranger whose motive they could not grasp.”327 Framing native Hawaiian resistance as confusion,

Roberts neatly elides the fact that kupuna who held fresh memories of broken treaties, violent occupation, and overthrow likely had keenly identified this curious white woman as yet another agent of American imperialist overthrow.

Seeking out elders for her study, Roberts engaged in a classic salvage methodology that framed a culture as past its heyday, where the only members truly able to engage with the culture were also those who were closest to the grave. The younger generation, on the other hand, was assumed to be more assimilated, and whatever knowledge they had would be lost in the next generation. In her article for the Bishop Museum handbook,

325 Roberts, “Hawaiian Music.” 326 Roberts, Ancient Hawaiian Music, 3. 327 Roberts, 4. Emphasis mine. Dye 168

Roberts acknowledged that the younger generation of Hawaiians was not as fluent in

Hawaiian than their elders. Rather than advocate for more Hawaiian language education, however, Roberts framed the loss of language as a potentially positive development.

Speaking about the loss of knowledge of kaona in Hawaiian poetry, Roberts expressed optimism that enjoying word imagery in the poetry might actually be preferable to knowledge of erotic second meanings:

In most cases the concealed meanings with probably lie forever hidden, since the Hawaiians of the younger generation, even though they be scholars, are generally unable to translate them, but there will remain plenty to enjoy in the obvious meanings and the remarkably beautiful word imagery. That erotic and voluptuous allusions lie behind much of the poetry is acknowledged, but that this is always the case is not true, nor must ancient poets be judged by modern standards either in living or in their frank devotion to ‘the divine passion.’328

This sense of hope is in line with those of Calvinist missionaries in Hawaii, who had long tried to suppress Hawaiian cultural expression like the hula on the grounds that it was sexually explicit. Indeed, much of Hawaiian chant used natural imagery as metaphor to celebrate the virility of the king and the fertility of the Hawaiian people. When the

“Merrie Monarch” King Kalakaua held a lavish coronation ceremony on February 12,

1883, that celebrated Hawaiian performative traditions that had been suppressed by over sixty years of missionary efforts, the haole press cited the hulas that celebrated

Kalakaua’s sexual strength as an example of the king’s barbarity and ineptitude.329 One

328 Roberts, “Hawaiian Music.” 329 John Troutman, Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 40–41. Dye 169 haole resident, William Castle, filed charges against the company who published the hula program in Hawaiian on the grounds of obscenity.330

In Roberts’ view, kaona was incompatible with a Calvinist, puritanical view of sexuality, but the lush imagery of the natural world would still make Hawaiian poetry a desirable commodity for a haole audience. Such a view reveals a touristic, colonial mindset that imagined the Hawaiian islands as a lush playground for haole visitors to occupy and consume, while the Hawaiian people themselves (whoever was left) assimilated into the occupier’s culture and/or assumed a subservient position relative to whites. This mindset keeps an ethnographer closed to the true intricacies of Hawaiian language and culture. As Noelani Arista has written, developing a kaona-centric exegetical approach to conceptualizing history not only grants the scholar deeper meaning of Hawaiian texts, but offers the possibility of thinking “in a way that reflects

Hawaiian systems of thought and connection and their tolerance and preference for multiplicity in the relation between not only words but worlds.”331

Moreover, predictions of impending extinction ignore the strength, agency, and adaptability of people and their culture. A particularly egregious example is Roberts’ prediction about the ipu, a hollow gourd percussive instrument that forms the rhythmic backdrop for much hula and chant. In the Bishop Museum handbook, Roberts wrote,

“The ipu will no doubt disappear with the passing of the present old generation.”332 In reality, well into the twenty-first century, the ipu remains a popular and iconic instrument for accompanying hula performances. At the Merrie Monarch Festival, an annual hula

330 Jon Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Dismembering Lãhui : A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 203, in Troutman, Kīkā Kila, 41. 331 Arista, “Navigating Uncharted Oceans of Meaning,” 666. 332 Roberts, “Hawaiian Music.” Dye 170 competition named for King Kalakaua, hula performances in the kahiko (pre-colonial) category regularly feature ipu accompaniment. The music activist organization Project

Kuleana, which creates online music videos of recent and historical Hawaiian protest songs sung by many different Hawaiian artists in a virtual kani ka pila (playing music together), featured three members of Halau Na Pualei O Likolehua playing the ipu in their video of the classic protest song “Kaulana Na Pua.”333 As I will show in the following sections, Roberts’ conception and treatment of Hawaiian music followed a tradition of white women ethnographers who documented indigenous music. This ethnographic tradition and the conclusions drawn from following its practices were at odds with an active, contemporaneous network of Hawaiian musicians and dancers performing throughout the United States and around the islands.

Figure 4: performers sound a rhythm on the ipu, the traditional Hawaiian gourd instrument, in Project Kuleana's video "Kaulana Na Pua," YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhibLQFebpQ

333 Project Kuleana, Kaulana Na Pua, YouTube Video, accessed June 21, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhibLQFebpQ. Dye 171

White Women and Imperialist Ethnography

Like many of the other women collectors profiled in this dissertation, Helen Heffron

Roberts was part of a larger tradition of white women working as ethnographers. Roberts specifically fits in to a colonialist, imperialist tactic of using white women ethnographers to explore the cultures of so-called “primitive” populations living in places where the

United States was looking to expand its reach. As the Unites States debated whether or not to colonize Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines in the 1890s, historian Louise Michele

Newman writes, opponents of annexation pointed to the “Negro problem” to illustrate the failure of white Americans trying to assimilate “foreign primitives.”334 White men, they argued, had proved unable to resist the temptations of miscegenation in places like the

U.S. South and were therefore seen as unfit for colonizing missions where it was necessary to maintain racial distinctiveness and white colonial social order. White women, whose sexual purity was championed and protected by white men, thus came to be seen as capable of civilizing native populations while maintaining the purity of the white race. White women were thus seen as the perfect agents for civilizing missions both overseas and within the Unites States.

Newman argues that, for white elite women who found new freedom acting as missionaries, explorers, educators, and ethnographers at the turn of the twentieth century, imperialism was an important discourse as it articulated a futuristic vision of social order and evolutionary development.335 These women championed cultural assimilation as a means through which to achieve a future where nonwhite people lived as equals among

334 Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15. Although Newman does not mention Hawaii specifically, her framework applies there as well. 335 Newman, 19–20. Dye 172 whites. Assimilation was framed as preferable and more compassionate than eugenicist notions of fixed, biological racial difference—rather than relegating nonwhite people to a life of servitude, assimilationists argued, they could encourage nonwhite and “foreign” people to reject their culture in favor of a white American one, i.e. “kill the Indian to save the man.”336 For white women ethnographers like Helen Heffron Roberts, assimilation work looked like documenting the musical culture of an indigenous population through forms, like sheet music, that rendered it legible to a white audience and fueled claims of barbarism and cultural “stagnation,” all the while anticipating and proclaiming the inevitable cultural death of that population. As I will show in this section, Roberts’ work aligned with that of Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore, both white women who recorded the music of American Indians in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, respectively. The work of all three can be viewed through the lens of

American imperialist westward expansion.

At the age of forty three, Alice Fletcher became an anthropologist after spending her many of her adult years as the secretary of Sorosis, one of America’s earliest women’s clubs, and a member of the Association for the Advancement of Women.337 In the field,

Fletcher worked with the Sioux, the Omaha, and the Nez Perce tribes.338 Fletcher biographer Joan T. Mark writes that one of Fletcher’s “repeatings,” which the biographer drew upon to understand her subject since Fletcher herself destroyed all documents related to the first forty years of her life, was struggle. “Over and over again,” Mark writes, “Alice Fletcher found herself struggling against male power, male authority, and

336 Newman, 20. 337 Joan T. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), xiii, 17, 27. 338 Mark, xiii. Dye 173 male prerogatives, against the limits society put on her because she was a woman.”339

Women’s clubs and organizations, Mark writes, were critical to Fletcher’s success as an ethnographer because they taught her how to successfully run an organization, gave her experience with public speaking, and brought her into contact with other ambitious, artistic white women like poet and writer Julia Ward Howe.340 However, these clubs also helped to firm Fletcher’s conviction that people with the means, time, and education to create social organizations, i.e. people like herself, were the “natural” leaders of society.341 In her work with American Indians, Fletcher would put those beliefs into action.

Fletcher, along with activists in the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), believed in assimilation through encouraging Indian women to adopt Western domestic duties. “The true civilization that begins with the child and the home must come through women’s work,” wrote WNIA president Amelia Quinton in 1888.342 These women held themselves as the standard to white Indian women were expected to conform, down to the style of their homes and the ways in which they dressed and acted.343 Ostensibly, this effort was done on behalf of Indian women; white women saw themselves as offering

Indian women the gift of patriarchy, as for them it largely translated into financial

339 Mark, xv. Mark, as Fletcher’s biographer, writes that a “sex-blind” position is an untenable way of viewing Fletcher, as it ignores the networks of women who assisted Fletcher in her work. “On the one hand, I felt the gently prodding of my feminist friends, who urged me to look at what I had been ignoring. What about, for example, the extensive female support system that Alice Fletcher created for herself? Why was all that support necessary if Alice Fletcher’s career moved along as smoothly as did the careers of her male colleagues? On the other hand, and finally overwhelmingly, I began to find that the more I worked on Alice Fletcher in traditional, sex-blind terms, the less I understood her. There seemed to be not only one Alice Fletcher but six or seven..,” xiv. While this chapter pushes back on framing Fletcher or her colleagues as feminist, I am grateful to Mark for viewing Fletcher’s life through the lens of her womanhood, as it helps me to make the connection between her imperialist ethnography and her white womanhood. 340 Mark, 27. 341 Mark, 28. 342 Qtd. in Newman, White Women’s Rights, 117. 343 Newman, 119. Dye 174 security and protection from sexual exploitation. For her part, Fletcher supported allotment policy, which broke up large reservations in favor of small, individually-owned parcels of land conducive to the nuclear family. However, Fletcher anticipated that this transition would be met with resistance, due to her experience with the Omaha tribe. As such the Dawes Act, the 1887 allotment legislation that Fletcher helped to write and pass, contained no provision necessitating tribal consent.344

Although Fletcher had little respect for the agency of Indians themselves, she felt a deep love for the creativity of their music. As Mark writes, “She had had a detached, intellectual curiosity about the Indian way of life, but the music aroused her to a deep, passionate, lifelong commitment to Indians.”345 Fletcher worked together with Francis La

Flesche, an ethnographer from the Omaha tribe, to create a monograph study of Omaha music; La Flesche sang and translated, while Fletcher transcribed the music onto a staff.346 The result of their work, the fifty page long “A Study of Omaha Music,” contained ninety-two songs, the largest collection of non-western music that had ever been published in one place.347 However, although she found the music beautiful,

Fletcher still considered the people who made them to be primitive due to their lack of a leisure class. As Mark writes, Fletcher speculated on how Omaha music might have

“evolved” if they adopted a class-based division of labor that left elites with ample free time to craft music.348

344 Newman, 125. “’The work must be done for them [Indians],’ Fletcher insisted, ‘whether they approve or not.’” 345 Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 217. 346 Mark, 217. “The combination of his knowledge and patience, her understanding of western musical forms, and their joint determination made their work possible.” 347 Mark, 225. 348 Mark, 226. Dye 175

An unusual aspect of “A Study of Omaha Music,” is that the songs are written in harmony, and with piano accompaniment, even though the Omaha sing in unison with percussive accompaniment. Fletcher found that the Omaha rejected a melody when she played a single line back for them on piano, only accepting it when she added chords underneath. Musicologist John C. Fillmore, who worked with Fletcher to translate the

Omaha songs into four-part harmonies, speculated that Indians held latent harmonies in their heads while singing in unison. Fillmore believed that the Indians too held the western diatonic scale as the foundation of their music; even if they sang out of tune occasionally, he argued, they were aiming for the same ideal as western singers.349

Fletcher would later say five years after her study was published that Indians

“approximate our diatonic scale.” The translation choice had immediate benefits for her, though: already divided into parts and accompaniment, “A Study of Omaha Music,” was perfectly prepared for parlor musicians and was thus likely to sell more copies.350 The white ethnographer directly profited from altering Indian melodies away from their contextual meaning and toward a form more readily understood and consumed by a white audience.

Fletcher’s methods of transcription were picked up by another ethnographer of

American Indian songs, Frances Densmore. Densmore was first introduced to the music of the American Indians when she saw the Indian exhibits at the Chicago Fair in 1893.

Portrayed through a Romantic lens as “noble savages,” the Indians at the Fair nevertheless scared Densmore, who later wrote, “I heard Indians sing, saw them dance

349 Mark, 227. 350 Mark, 228. Although Mark concedes this fact, she remains convinced that Fletcher accepted this translation choice because of “professional insecurity” in the face of Fillmore’s musical expertise. Dye 176 and heard them yell, and was scared almost to death.”351 She would later get a job with the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) to record American Indian songs in the field, and is now regarded as one of the leading figures in American Indian ethnography.352

Densmore was a trained musician who had studied with composition with John Knowles

Paine of Harvard and piano with Carl Baermann. She put these two skills to work in her work as an ethnographer. When Densmore recorded two songs from a Dakota woman named Wapatanka, for example, she “wrote down the songs as they were sung,” as she wrote in her diary, “adding simple chords like those used by Miss [Alice] Fletcher.”353

She transformed one of these songs into a “choral march” and printed both in the

Chilocco’s Indian School Journal in April 1907.354

As historian John Troutman writes, Densmore enthusiastically encouraged the creation and appreciation of “proper,” sanitized versions of Native music.355 Densmore believed that the recordings she made were relics of the past and had no place in modern life. She traveled to Indian schools from 1904-1921 to teach students the westernized, harmonized versions of songs she had collected. Troutman deftly articulates the double actions of erasure and assimilation that this act accomplished: harmonized choral forms of recorded songs were “far removed from the musical systems that originally structured the content and performance of the songs and far removed from the indigenous systems

351 Charles Hofmann, Frances Densmore and American Indian Music; a Memorial Volume. (New York,: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1968), 1–2; qtd. in Adrienne Fried Block, “Amy Beach’s Music on Native American Themes,” American Music 8, no. 2 (1990): 144–45. 352 Smithsonian’s NMNH @NMNH, “As a Collaborator with the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, Frances T. Densmore (1867 – 1957) Dedicated over 50 Years of Her Life to the Recording and Documentation of American Indian Music. #BecauseOfHerStory #WomensHistoryMonth,” Tweet, Twitter, March 5, 2020, https://twitter.com/NMNH/status/1235671593235476493. 353 Densmore, Extract from Diaries, 1906. Qtd. in John William Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 160. 354 Troutman, 160. 355 Troutman, 163. Dye 177 of knowledge that originally structured their meaning.”356 Densmore thus attempted to cut the students off from any direct sources of cultural knowledge, all the while replacing it with western forms of knowledge and organization.357

Densmore was also a big proponent of Euro-American operatic and orchestral works that used her transcribed songs as source material. To Densmore and the “Indianist” composers who based their work on field recordings and transcriptions of Indian songs, these compositions represented an American folk heritage and called to mind images of

America’s vast “natural” landscape.358 To many at the time, simply using music related to

Indians in American compositions proved controversial. Boston Herald critic Philip Hale argued that because, “the great majority of Americans are neither negro nor Indian, nor are they the descendants of them,” music based on American Indian themes couldn’t represent an American sound.359 Composers like Annabel Morris Buchanan agreed, and argued for incorporating the melodies and modes of Anglo-American mountaineers into nationalist American orchestral works. Read against these protests, Densmore and the

Indianist composers have been framed as well-intentioned, if not slightly problematic.

However, it is important to recognize that these actions separate the music from its

356 Troutman, 160. 357 Many scholars have dismantled the idea of field recordings as objective, neutral documents. Erika Brady has looked specifically at the large role the phonograph played in early recording trips, as well as ethnographers’ tendency to avoid any reference to it. Roshanak Kheshti has specifically identified a “raced and gendered practice of recording and archiving music,” identifying the white woman’s ear as a key factor in early recording missions. Densmore would thus still be carrying out acts of erasure and assimilation were she to share her recordings with the Indian students. Roshanak Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 19; Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 53. 358 Troutman, Indian Blues, 162. Some composers that used Densmore’s transcribed melodies were Alberto Bimboni, Alfred Manger, and Carl Busch. Amy Beach, who I briefly discussed in Chapter 2, was a part of this compositional movement, but used Fletcher’s work rather than Densmore’s as source material. 359 Hale, “The Symphony of Homesick Genius,” Boston Herald, June 30, 1907. Qtd. in Block, “Amy Beach’s Music on Native American Themes,” 145. Dye 178 original meaning and context, replacing it with a Romantic western viewpoint, form, and sound. Densmore, although largely portrayed as preserving American Indian culture, ultimately worked happily to erase it and promote instead a white Western idea of

American Indian culture. Her musical training was the tool with which she worked to accomplish this goal.

Hawaiian Popular Music and Resistance to Colonialism

As Helen Heffron Roberts travelled to Hawaii, Hawaiian musicians were making opposite trips, travelling from the islands to the continental United States, performing contemporary Hawaiian music that sometimes held resistance sentiment or allegiance to the overthrown monarchy. This section discusses the counter-movements made by

Hawaiian musicians during the time of Roberts’ ethnographic trip, both to counter the idea the Hawaiians and Hawaiian culture were “dying out” and also to explore modes of

Hawaiian musical resistance to colonial rule that have lasting influence in present-day

Hawaiian music activism. I argue that Hawaiians actively defied Robert’s colonialist claims of cultural stagnation and imperialist claims that the culture was dying out, and that they did so largely through adapting traditional culture to modern situations. In doing so, they in fact continued a Hawaiian tradition of exploration and worldliness. Hawaiians’ ability to remain rooted in traditional culture, one that involved exploration, adaptability, and diplomacy, I argue, was unrecognizable to ethnographers like Roberts who were invested in framing them as primitive and poorly developed. Ultimately, this colonial failure to truly listen and understand, I speculate, might be the key to colonialism’s downfall. Dye 179

Hula, the traditional sacred Hawaiian dance, burst onto the American popular stage in the decades following the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the annexation of

Hawaiian lands. Hula circuits—a term historian Adria Imada uses to describe the popular hula tours that performed for largely Euro-American audiences in Western metropolitan areas, rural outposts, and small towns beginning in the late nineteenth century and peaking in the middle of the twentieth—functioned as a strategic part of American imperialism.360 Presented as exotic yet accessible to white Americans, these hula circuits introduced one aspect of Hawaiian culture to Americans who saw the islanders as foreign and were uneasy about accepting Hawaiians into the tent of “Americans.” Hula shows helped to reframe America’s hostile overthrow of the Hawaiian nation as harmless, with

Hawaiians as happy natives who welcomed American leadership desired to share their culture with Americans and spread a sense of “aloha.” Hula shows helped make Hawaii intelligible to American audiences, allowing them to see Hawaii as a welcoming playground for tourists rather than a strange, distant land full of natives who were angry and potentially dangerous. These shows also obscured ongoing military and tourist expansion in Hawaii—to an audience, the overthrow was a thing of the past and now they were free to consume and use Hawaii (seemingly with the consent of Hawaiians) as they pleased.

Young women were employed as dancers as part of the American imperialist strategy; however, these women often did not view themselves as victims of imperialism but leveraged their fame and money strategically to fashion themselves as both Hawaiian and modern. Hapa haole (part white, part Hawaiian) women were by farther most popular

360 Imada, Aloha America, 5. Dye 180 hula performers, outnumbering men and Hawaiian women. The whiteness of these performers made their beauty legible to audiences, and helped audiences see Hawaiians as less exotic and more “American.” Their bodies became objects of desire by white audiences, who saw the performers—and by extension, the islands—as enticing and available to white invasion. As Imada points out, however, these performers were not passive participants in an American imperialist project. Instead, Imada argues, they styled themselves for photographs in fashionable Victorian style, presenting themselves as modern, worldly citizens much like Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani.361 Such an action resisted the colonialist consumption of their bodies that was encouraged in popular hula performances that asked them to don costumes, such as grass skirts, that signified primitivism and were not traditional to Hawaiian culture. Rather, these hula dancers styled themselves in ways that would signify to Americans that they were worldly and knowledgeable, and above all, commanding respect.362

Around the same time, Hawaiian sounds were making waves in the popular music industry, and Hawaiian instrumental music shows could be regularly found on vaudeville stages in American cities and rural towns alike. As John Troutman writes in his history of the kika kila, the Hawaiian lap steel guitar, a visitor to New York City in 1912 would have had opportunities to see Hawaiian musicians play in many venues throughout the city. Like hula troupes, Hawaiian musicians also traveled throughout the United States in circuits.363 Tin Pan Alley songwriters took notice of the Hawaiian music craze sweeping the nation and responded with a glut of hapa haole pseudo-Hawaiian songs. These were

361 Imada, 86. 362 Imada, 86. 363 Troutman, Kīkā Kila, 87–89. Dye 181 often racially offensive songs that gestured at or approximated Hawaiian musical styles and Hawaiian language in order to capitalize on a white thirst for an “exotic” yet familar sound. Al Jolson’s 1916 Columbia Records recording, “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula

(Hawaiian Love Song)” is a prime example of this genre. Accompanied by a brass band,

Jolson sings about a “hula maiden” who captures his heart by singing the song’s title, a nonsense phrase designed to sound roughly Hawaiian. Still, the music industry was responding to the real success of Hawaiian groups touring the nation and performing distinctly Hawaiian music in distinctly Hawaiian arrangements. Hawaiian groups often played in small groups of stringed instruments; a common arrangement would be a quartet consisting of one ukulele player, two guitarists, and one slide guitarist.364 Some groups—like Toots Paka’s Hawaiians, which featured Iolai “July” Kealoha Paka, the son of Juliana Walanika, a celebrated singer in King Kalakaua’s court, and Joseph Kekuku, a

Maui-born musician who invented the Hawaiian steel guitar—focused on recording songs in the Hawaiian language, and maintained a distinct royalist political stance. Their recordings made it back to the Hawaiian islands, as well as throughout the Hawaiian diaspora, likely bolstering Hawaiian pride and resistance sentiment towards the United

States.365

While the guitar would not be considered an “ancient” Hawaiian instrument like the ipu, it being brought to Hawaii by traders likely between 1818 and the 1830s by

Mexican vaqueros in California or by whaling crews or missionaries travelling from New

England, by the late nineteenth century, the Hawaiian style of playing guitar was

364 Troutman, 93. A photo of Keoki “George” Awai and his Royal Hawaiian Quartette illustrates this arrangement. A similar arrangement is still used among Hawaiian music groups in the present day, but the slide guitar is often replaced by a stand-up bass. 365 Troutman, 85. Dye 182 considered by haoles and Hawaiians alike to be a decidedly Native musical practice. For

Hawaiians, the guitar was a portable instrument that suited Hawaiian musical styles, and for haoles, the guitar represented Hawaiian resistance to haole business and haole rule.

As Troutman writes, the Hawaiian guitar was adapted specifically to translate traditional

Hawaiian musical styles onto the guitar; for example, frets were eliminated in order to achieve a sweeping movement that imitated vocals in Hawaiian chant.366 Plantation owners saw Hawaiian guitar culture as antithetical to their desire for a docile labor force, often complaining that Hawaiian were lazy, as they preferred to lie back and play guitar rather than labor in sugar cane plantations.367 In the period directly preceding the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, when King Kalakaua made his concentrated effort to bring back Hawaiian expressive culture, the Hawaiian guitar was part of that movement. In the period following the overthrow, Hawaiian musicians made their allegiance to the Hawaiian kingdom and the disposed Queen Liliuokalani known, keeping that spirit alive even as they travelled the world. The Hawaiian guitar thus represented a vibrant, lively Hawaiian music practice, engaged in resistance politics to colonial rule, occurring contemporaneously with Roberts’ ethnographic trip. Where Roberts’ study elides political sentiment and paints Hawaiian expressive culture as dying out, Hawaiian musicians continued to thrive and create music that expressed their traditions and their politics.

Using music to express resistance to colonial rule, these musicians practiced a tradition carried on to this day. Hawaiian musical traditions have consistently been

366 Troutman, 61. 367 Troutman, 30. Plantation owners surmised that labor in sugar plantations would “free” Hawaiians from a state of “savagery,” so Hawaiians’ unwillingness to participate in this plan, often through playing music and making merriment, was seen as a direct act of resistance to colonial power. Dye 183 enacted for protest efforts throughout the last century, ranging from metaphoric resistance to use in direct action against the state. The “Hawaiian Renaissance” of the 1970s began a resurgence of Hawaiian culture in popular local music and media that carried explicit statements of resistance and often accompanied or was a part of direct action. The local radio station KCCN began broadcasting twenty-four hours of Hawaiian songs in 1966, playing artists that were bringing back old styles of slack key guitar and falsetto singing, and were singing old chants and new songs in the Hawaiian language. The activist

George Helm—who disappeared at sea when travelling to the island of Kaho’olawe as part of the protest efforts against the U.S. Military’s use of the small island as a missile testing site—was also a highly skilled musician who sang in a traditional falsetto style and used the kaona tradition to weave resistance metaphors into songs about Hawaiian mythology. “In Hawaii, the music was just this,” Lewis writes. “As it bloomed, so did the emerging sense of Hawaiian pride, ha’aheo, which was intimately intertwined with the emerging struggle for Hawaiian rights in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”368 As a result of the “Hawaiian Renaissance,” Hawaiian language immersion schools have been established, Hawaiian traditions of ocean navigation were revived, an Office of Hawaiian

Affairs was created in state government, and the traditional style of music (continuously adapted to fit modern styles and address current affairs) has remained squarely in the center of popular music in Hawaii.369

368 George H. Lewis, “Storm Blowing from Paradise: Social Protest and Oppositional Ideology in Popular Hawaiian Music,” Popular Music 10, no. 1 (1991): 53–54. 369 Lewis, 64. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs holds a contentious presence among the Hawaiian community. In the 2020 election cycle, Lanakila Mangauil, a prominent figure in the Mauna Kea protest movement and candidate for Office of Hawaiian Affairs Board of Trustees Hawaii Island resident, told the online news site Honolulu Civil Beat, “OHA is ineffective to the extent that it operates like a typical bureaucracy. As managers of an agency dedicated exclusively to Hawaiian affairs, its trustees have the opportunity to abandon policies that further colonize its beneficiaries in favor of ones that truly improve their lives. This means rejecting corporatist analyses that place the highest value on institutional profits in Dye 184

One can see the musical protest tradition most clearly in the present day land disputes on Mauna Kea (sometimes called Mauna A Wakea, or mountain of the sky god Wakea).

Protesting the state-backed construction of a Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) on a

Hawaiian wahi pana (sacred place) that figures prominently in oral tradition, the kia’i

(protectors) of Mauna Kea have used the encampment they created at the base of Mauna

Kea as a cultural education site. Kia’i lead hula and chant workshops and host lectures on

Hawaiian history and tradition at “Pu’uhululu University.”370 The Mauna Kea kia’i invoke the religious tradition of kapu aloha, meaning that everyone engaged in protection efforts on the mauna (the kia’i do not characterize their actions as “protest” but rather a continuation of the Hawaiian tradition of protecting and honoring the land) needed to conduct themselves with the spirit of aloha. As religious scholar Greg Johnson described in a study of religious performance on Mauna Kea, “the formal message can be summarized as: we are here in ritual comportment acting in a manner above and beyond the worldly authority of laws, especially those of a colonial state.”371 On June 24, 2015, the state saw the power of Hawaiian resistance. As state police, escorting construction vehicles up the mountain, attempted to arrest kia’i blocking the road, they were met with line after line of kia’i chanting and dancing the hula in an act of non-violent resistance.372

The effort worked: no construction vehicles made it up the mountain on that day or any

favor of metrics that directly track gains in health, prosperity and sustainability.” The Civil Beat Staff, “Candidate Q&A: Office of Hawaiian Affairs Hawaii Island Trustee — Lanakila Mangauil,” Online News Site, Honolulu Civil Beat, October 3, 2020, https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/10/candidate-qa-office-of- hawaiian-affairs-hawaii-island-trustee-lanakila-mangauil/. 370 For an example of a Pu’uhuluhulu University Lecture, see this one, given on September 21, 2019: Kapu Aloha & Law - Ken Lawson and Kaleikoa Ka‘eo, accessed November 8, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx6fgg-qlLw. 371 Greg Johnson, “Materialising and Performing Hawaiian Religion(s) on Mauna Kea,” in Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s), ed. Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft (Brill, 2017), 162. 372 Johnson, 162. Dye 185 day since, and the kia’i actions had a moving effect even on the officers tasked to arrest them. A moving video shows an officer from the Department of Land and Natural

Resources apologizing to the kia’i for his role in the days events as he informed them that construction vehicles would not try to proceed up the mountain.373

The Mauna Kea movement has birthed a new anthem, “Ku Ha’aheo,” whose creation and distribution highlight the ways that kia’i remain connected to ancient tradition while utilizing modern technologies and methods of communication. “Ku Ha’aheo” was composed by Hinaleimoana Wong, affectionately called “Kumu Hina” by the community, as a part of the 2015 movement on Mauna Kea. Written in a traditional style, the song has become an instant classic and has been recorded as a collaboration of over three dozen Hawaiian recording artists and used as part of a worldwide kani ka pila video.374 The lyrics of “Ku Ha’aheo” invoke Hawaiian mythology directly and also through metaphor, seen in verses one and four of the mele, written below. I have also included the chorus to show the song’s main message:

Verse One: Kaiko'o ka moana ka i lana nei Hawai'i/ The sea of Hawai'i surges in turmoil Naueue a halulu ka honua a Haumea/ The earth of Haumea rumbles and shakes Nakulukulu e ka lani ki'eki'e kau mai i luna/ The hightest of heavens shudder up above Aue ke aloha 'ole a ka malihini/ Alas! Woeful indeed are the heartless foreigners!

Verse Four: E lei mau i lei mau kakou e na mamo aloha/ Be honored always oh beloved descendants of the land I lei wehi 'a'ali'i wehi nani o ku'u 'aina/ Let us wear the honored 'a'ali'i of our beloved land Hoe a mau hoe a mau no ka pono sivila/ Paddle on in our pursuits of civil justice

373 Mileka Lincoln, Crying Police Apologize to Protesters, Facebook video, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/milekalincoln.hnn/videos/breakingnews-hawaii-dlnr-department-of-land-and- natural-resources-agents-just-in/912392835486278/. The agent’s announcement is met with many cries of “mahalo” and a spontaneous chant beginning. 374 These two videos show “Ku Ha’aheo sung by Wong and the Mauna Kea kia’i on the mountain, and the music video recorded in a studio with over thirty popular Hawaiian singers. Kumu Hina - Ku Ha’aheo on Mauna Kea, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-UB3XwiPzs; Kū Haʻaheo Music Video, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbMX_LoT_YA. Dye 186

A ho'iho'i hou 'ia mai ke ku'oko'a/ Until our dignity and independence is restored

Chorus: Ku ha'aheo e ku'u Hawai'i/ Stand tall my Hawai'i Mamaka kaua o ku'u 'aina/ Band of warriors of my land 'O ke ehu kakahiaka o na 'oiwi o Hawai'i nei/ The new dawn for our people of Hawai'i is upon us No ku'u lahui e ha'awi pau a i ola mau/ For my nation I give my all so that our legacy lives on

In verse one, Wong describes the earth of Haumea, the goddess of childbirth and fertility, and one of the oldest in Hawaiian mythology. By doing so, Wong defines the land as belonging to the ancient Hawaiian goddess, simultaneously defining the kia’i as descendants of this ancient tradition. By describing Native Hawaiians as “descendants of the land” in verse four, she similarly ties them both to the land they are protecting, and to an ancient practice of aloha ‘aina (love of the land) that precedes the colonial rule.

Additionally, in verse four, Wong uses the metaphor of paddling as strategic kaona: the simple metaphor gets to the heart of Hawaiian tradition, as paddling was vitally important to the initial settlement of the Hawaiian islands, traditional Hawaiian warfare practices, and the modern reconstruction of these traditions through things like competitive paddling clubs. In its lyrics alone, “Ku Ha’aheo” asserts that present day Hawaiians are knowledgeable of and connected to their ancestral traditions.

“Ku Ha’aheo”’s use in the worldwide #Jam4MaunaKea video, produced by Mana

Maoli, a non-profit organization that supports Hawaiian cultural and musical education programs, shows the modernity and adaptability of Hawaiian traditions.375 As Greg

Johnson has observed, the Mauna Kea kia’i are mostly very young, usually in their

375 Worldwide #Jam4MaunaKea- “Kū Ha’aheo” & “Hawai’i Loa,” accessed November 8, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Ul5xp4PTg. Dye 187 twenties and thirties. While elders remain vitally important to the perpetuation of tradition, Johnson writes, young community members have taken up authoritative roles and within them, demonstrate their mastery of linguistic tradition. “Whereas the previous generation of religious leaders […] primarily practiced tradition by means of mastering an established canon of chants and prayers,” he writes, “leaders of the contemporary generation have the linguistic capacity and audacity (some would say) to generate entirely new songs and protocols.”376 In the #Jam4MaunaKea event, people across the globe were invited to support the Mauna Kea movement by joining kia’i in a “virtual kanikapila” group sing of “Ku Ha’aheo” and “Hawaii Loa,” a Hawaiian Renaissance-era protest song written by Liko Martin. Many groups across the Hawaiian islands, members of the Hawaiian diaspora throughout the globe, and hula troupes in places like Japan that are keenly interested in Hawaiian expressive culture, joined in at 11:11am on August 11,

2019, the videos of which were compiled by Mana Maoli into a music video that was released at the start of 2020. #Jam4MaunaMea shows the current generation of Native

Hawaiians as technologically savvy, capable of organizing globally, and deftly adapting traditional practices to meet the demands of the current day.

Conclusion: “Anglo-Saxon reasoning cannot appreciate”

Helen Heffron Roberts, in her Hawaii trip, carried out the missives of the imperialist state like many other white women ethnographers did, through viewing Hawaiian music through the lens of Western music and judging it inferior. She pronounced the culture to be dying out as the elders passed on and the younger generation became assimilated into

376 Johnson, “Materialising and Performing Hawaiian Religion(s) on Mauna Kea,” 165. Dye 188

Western culture, simultaneously arguing that new settlers could enjoy the beauty of

Hawaiian poetry (said to be the high point of Hawaiian culture) even with only a rudimentary understanding of the Hawaiian language. However, as shown in the previous section, Roberts’ conclusions fail to recognize the Hawaiian traditions of exploration and diplomacy, as demonstrated by Hawaiians who reached, and who continue to reach, outside of the islands to share their cultural knowledge and commune with others. She also seems to have failed to understand the depths of Hawaiian knowledge and the way that Hawaiian music carries forward these ways of knowing for those who maintain

Hawaiian values of aloha. As activist George Helm said, “Hawaiian music reflects attitudes toward life and nature. These are basically clean protests, not harsh, but with a deep hidden meaning, which Anglo-Saxon reasoning cannot appreciate.”377

The sounds of Hawaiian music can be read from a perspective of protest and sounding out against settler-colonial logics, despite being nahenahe, a “sweet, gentle, melodious” aesthetic, argues musicologist Kevin Fellezs. Fellezs has analyzed the sound of slack-key guitar, one of the primary sonic signifiers of Hawaiian music, particularly in the mid- to late-twentieth century, as one of defiance and articulation of indigenous agency rather than as capitulation to colonial forces or as nostalgic indulgence.378 Fellezs links the sounds of slack key guitar to Hawaiian knowledge and practices centered around beauty and gentleness, values that stand in direct opposition to the practices of domination, plunder, overthrow, and genocide practiced by colonialists like those that overthrew the Hawaiian kingdom and illegally occupied Hawaiian lands. “Nahenahe can

377 Helm, qtd. in Lewis, “Storm Blowing from Paradise,” 63. 378 Kevin Fellezs, “Nahenahe (Soft, Sweet, Melodious): Sounding Out Native Hawaiian Self- Determination,” Journal of the Society for American Music 13, no. 4 (November 2019): 425. Dye 189 appear delicate,” he writes, “yet its strength is derived from the resilience forged from flexibility and the quiet assurance of those who have endured in a homeland from which they have been made to feel alienated and dispossessed.”379 This aesthetic, like all of

Hawaiian culture, art, and dance, is rooted in a subsistence way of life, which can be explained by the concept of aloha ‘āina or love of the land.

Fellezs’ read of nahenahe sounds can help us understand what Helen Heffron

Roberts was unable to when she claimed that it was possible, perhaps preferable, to lose the hidden kaona meaning in Hawaiian chant, since listeners could still enjoy the

“obvious meanings and the remarkably beautiful word imagery.” Roberts’ assumption relied on the presence of an imagined white, colonial listener, or a Hawaiian listener or practitioner so assimilated into Western thought that they could only appreciate or perform these songs in a way that reflected a Western sensibility and value system. What

Roberts’ salvage ethnography did not account for was the endurance of the Hawaiian people and their ability to stay rooted in their values and cultural systems after sustained colonial force. Dennis Kamakahi’s “Wahine ‘Ilikea,” and the cultural movement that surged back into the Hawaiian mainstream less than a half-century after Roberts’ trip, brings life to where Roberts and the American government have tried to strip it away.

Kamakahi himself claimed that “our music is our sovereignty.”380 Hawaiian artists and musicians in the twentieth century have been able to express deep sentiment and articulate strong Hawaiian identity through modern styles of music like the slack-key guitar because they remain rooted in aloha ‘āina, expressed through nahenahe and a

379 Fellezs, 426. 380 Nate Chinen, “Dennis Kamakahi, 61, Hawaiian Guitarist and Composer, Dies,” The New York Times, May 1, 2014, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/arts/music/dennis-kamakahi-hawaiian- renaissance-songwriter-dies-at-61.html. Dye 190 variety of traditional musical, religious, and cultural practices. They do not need to rely, as Roberts suggested, on fragments of their culture as understood and valued by white settler-colonialist outsiders.

Dye 191

Conclusion:

Over the last few years, two of America’s largest folklore institutions have publicly promoted the women collectors in their archive. Most notably is the Library of Congress’

American Folklife Center, who launched a two-year initiative to explore the work of women within their collections. The AFC kicked off this initiative with “Women

Documenting the World: Women as Folklorists, Ethnomusicologists, and Fieldworkers,” a day-long event of presentations and discussions held on September 26, 2019.381 I was fortunate enough to present a talk at that event. My presentation was part of the morning panel, which focused on historical research, whereas the afternoon panel focused on current work being done by a diverse coalition of women folklorists.

Similarly, Smithsonian Folkways celebrated women’s history month in 2020 in part by sharing several Instagram posts dedicated to women of American folk music, using the hashtag #BecauseOfHerStory. The Smithsonian Folkways posts highlighted performer Hazel Dickens and ethnographer Frances Densmore. Both posts received enthusiastic responses, save for one critical comment on the Densmore post written by a certain graduate student who was currently writing a dissertation chapter on Densmore and her colleagues Alice Fletcher and Helen Heffron Roberts. Both efforts, the AFC event and the Smithsonian’s social media campaign, encouraged scholars and enthusiasts to further explore the lives and work of these women, offering much more knowledge in their archives and in their publications.

This dissertation supports these efforts; indeed, as I hope I have shown here, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained from exploring the archived collections of women

381 “Women Documenting the World: Women as Folklorists, Ethnomusicologists & Fieldworkers.” Dye 192 fieldworkers, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists. This dissertation offers an explanation for the large number of white women collectors found in the archives of large institutions—because white women’s daily lives in the early twentieth century as teachers, homemakers, musicians, stenographers, and the like, brought them into contact with folk songs and provided some structures for how those songs would be understood, written about, and performed. Exploring the archived collections of women folklorists not only shines light into the work these women did, but it illuminates networks of women, the scope of women’s labor, and the unique insights these folklorists brought to their work. This dissertation aims to promote a view of women folklorists not as exceptional individuals but as individuals carrying forward practices and traditions, reflective of their race, gender and class positionality, that were taught to them and that they may have taught to others. If the study of folklore is a field that is interested in the practices and traditions that people learn and pass on, then it is fitting that a folklore archive might offer insights into the tradition of song collecting itself.

This dissertation also cautions against a “white feminist” read of these collectors, one which contrasts their work only or primarily with that of their male counterparts, and neglects other factors, such as race and class, that weave their way into the song collecting work, often shaping it considerably. What I hope to have shown here is that putting these song collectors and their work into a larger context, within white women’s lives and within the social-political world in which they conducted their work, requires us to confront structures of gendered white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism. As my four chapters demonstrate, folk song collecting methods, indeed the collected material itself, reflected the interests and desires of a world much larger than the individual being Dye 193 recorded. Considering race and class in particular, as they intersect with gender in the practice of folk song collection, opens up a much wider, complex, and interesting history of American folk song collection in the early twentieth century, one that is connected to societal shifts, contemporaneous world events, and anxieties and power struggles that still resonate in the present day.

At least three out of the four chapters of this dissertation directly demonstrate the ways that white women folklorists used their work specifically to further structures of white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism. Although I look at the perpetuation of these structures specifically through the lens of white womanhood and practices associated with white womanhood, my general conclusion is similar to previous studies of the myth of folkloric “authenticity” that show the power and authority the folklorist held in shaping the narrative of the collected material. My findings regarding the perpetuation of racist, colonial power structures through the work of collecting folk songs too resonate with existing work on folklorists such as Cecil Sharp and the Lomaxes. As such, this dissertation, if it may advocate for future work, argues that, should song collecting continue as an institutional practice, institutions should aim to cut out the middlemen as much as possible and provide money and resources directly to communities interested in documenting and perpetuating their own folk traditions. It looks forward to a future where documentation of traditional practices is locally-centered, where wealth and resources are distributed widely and equitably, and where preservation of folk traditions includes an investment into the material conditions that allow communities to thrive and grow together.

Dye 194

Archived Collections Consulted

Annabel Morris Buchanan Papers. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries. Chapel Hill, NC. Arthur Kyle Davis Papers, Acc #9829. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. University of Virginia Libraries. Charlottesville, Va. Helen H. Roberts Papers (AFC 1979/100), HI-70. Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The Ruby Pickens Tartt Papers. Alabama Room, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama. Livingston, Alabama. The Virginia Folklore Society Archive, Acc. #9936. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. Charlottesville, Va.

Works Cited

Agawu, Kofi. Representing African Music. Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa.” In Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Arista, Noelani. “Navigating Uncharted Oceans of Meaning: Kaona as Historical and Interpretive Method.” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 663–69. Bailey, Candace. Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Beckwith, Martha Warren. Hawaiian Mythology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940. Bell, Michael J. “‘No Borders to the Ballad Maker’s Art’: Francis James Child and the Politics of the People.” Western Folklore 47, no. 4 (1988): 285–307. Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Bix, Amy Sue. “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: ‘Women’s Work” in Biology.” Social Studies of Science 27, no. 4 (August 1997). Blair, Karen J. The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890-1930. Philanthropic Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Block, Adrienne Fried. “Amy Beach’s Music on Native American Themes.” American Music 8, no. 2 (1990): 141–66. Bohlman, Philip. “Landscape—Region—Nation—Reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity.” In Music and German National Identity, edited by Celia Applegate and Pamela Maxine Potter, 105–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Brady, Erika. A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Brockaway, Howard. “The Quest of the Lonesome Tunes.” The Art World 2, no. 3 (June 1917). Dye 195

Brown, Alan, David Vassar Taylor, and Ruby Pickens Tartt, eds. Gabr’l Blow Sof’: Sumter County, Alabama Slave Narratives. 1st ed. Livingston, AL: Livingston Press, The University of West Alabama, 1997. Brown, Virginia Pounds, Laurella Owens, and Ruby Pickens Tartt. Toting the Lead Row: Ruby Pickens Tartt, Alabama Folklorist. University, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1981. Buchanan, Annabel Morris. “Modal and Melodic Structure in Anglo-American Folk Music: A Neutral Mode.” Papers Read by Members of the American Musicological Society at the Annual Meeting, 1939, 84–111. Burks, Benjamin D. “What Was Normal About Virginia’s Normal Schools: A History of Virginia’s State Normal Schools, 1882-1930.” University of Virginia, 2002. Campbell, Gavin James. “Classical Music and the Politics of Gender in America, 1900- 1925.” American Music 21, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 446–73. ———. Music & the Making of a New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Campbell, Olive Dame. “Songs and Ballads of the Southern Mountains.” The Survey 33 (October 1914). Censer, Jane Turner. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Chambers, Virginia. “The Hindman Settlement School and Its Music.” Journal of Research in Music Education 21, no. 2 (Summer 1973). Chinen, Nate. “Dennis Kamakahi, 61, Hawaiian Guitarist and Composer, Dies.” The New York Times, May 1, 2014, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/arts/music/dennis-kamakahi-hawaiian- renaissance-songwriter-dies-at-61.html. Cole, Ross. “On the Politics of Folk Song Theory in Edwardian England.” Ethnomusicology 63, no. 1 (2019): 19–42. Davis, Arthur Kyle, ed. Traditional Ballads of Virginia. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1929. Davis Jr., Arthur Kyle. “On the Collecting and Editing of Ballads.” American Speech 5, no. 6 (1930): 452–55. DiSavino, Elizabeth. Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky’s Forgotten Ballad Collector. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2020. Doktor, Stephanie. “‘The Jazz Problem’: How U.S. Composers Grappled With the Sounds of Blackness, 1917-1925.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2016. Dorr, Gregory Michael. Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Dunphy, John J. “A Brief History of Monticello College in Godfrey, Illinois.” Medium, January 23, 2019. https://medium.com/@johnjdunphy/a-brief-history-of- monticello-college-in-godfrey-illinois-c2109137d6ff. Eisenfeld, Sue. Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Epstein, Dena J. “A White Origin for the Black Spiritual? An Invalid Theory and How It Grew.” American Music 1, no. 2 (1983): 53–59. Dye 196

———. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals : Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Equal Justice Initiative. “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” 2017. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/. Feder, J. Lester. “Unequal Temperament: The Somatic Acoustics of Racial Difference in the Symphonic Music of John Powell.” Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 1 (2008): 17–56. Fellezs, Kevin. “Nahenahe (Soft, Sweet, Melodious): Sounding Out Native Hawaiian Self-Determination.” Journal of the Society for American Music 13, no. 4 (November 2019): 411–35. Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Cultural Studies of the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Filipovic, Jill. “Trump’s Win Boils down to White Women.” CNN. Accessed November 11, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/opinions/trumps-win-women- filipovic/index.html. Films for the Humanities & Sciences (Firm), Films Media Group, and Team Sound & Vision Inc. The Women of Hull House. Harnessing Statistics for Progressive Reform. New York, N.Y.: Films Media Group, 2005. Fornander, Abraham. An Account of the Polynesian Race, Its Origins and Migrations and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People to the Times of Kamehameha I. Vol. 3. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & co., ltd., 1885. Frisbie, Charlotte J. “Helen Heffron Roberts (1888-1985): A Tribute.” Ethnomusicology 33, no. 1 (1989): 97–111. Gladden, Texas. Texas Gladden: Ballad Legacy. CD. Alan Lomax Collection. Rounder Records, 2001. Glen Grant. “Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen: A Voice for Hawaiian Sovereignty.” In Hawaii’s Story, by Hawaii’s Queen, vii–xiii. Honolulu, Hawaii: Mututal Publishing, 1990. Gold, David, and Catherine L. Hobbs. Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women’s Colleges, 1884-1945. Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Gold, John R., and George Revill. “Gathering the Voices of the People? Cecil Sharp, Cultural Hybridity, and the Folk Music of Appalachia.” GeoJournal 65, no. 1/2 (February 2006). Gruber, Jacob W. “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 72, no. 6 (1970): 1289–99. Hagstrom Miller, Karl. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples.” In German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, edited by Hugh Barr Nisbet. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Dye 197

Hofmann, Charles. Frances Densmore and American Indian Music; a Memorial Volume. New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1968. Horowitz, Joseph. Wagner Nights: An American History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. “Huapala’s Hulas.” TIME Magazine. TIME USA, LLC, May 3, 1937. Imada, Adria L. Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Jackson, George Pullen. “Some Enemies of Folk-Music in America.” Papers Read by Members of the American Musicological Society at the Annual Meeting, 1939, 77–83. ———. “Stephen Foster’s Debt to American Folk-Song.” The Musical Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1936): 154–69. Jackson, Richard. “Jackson, George Pullen.” Grove Music Online, 2001. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001 /omo-9781561592630-e-0000014025. Jensen, Joan M., and Michelle Wick Patterson. Travels with Frances Densmore: Her Life, Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Johnson, Greg. “Materialising and Performing Hawaiian Religion(s) on Mauna Kea.” In Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s), edited by Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft, 156–75. Brill, 2017. Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property : White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Kanahele, George S., ed. Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979. Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581–606. Kapu Aloha & Law - Ken Lawson and Kaleikoa Ka‘eo. Accessed November 8, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx6fgg-qlLw. Karpf, Juanita. “‘In an Easy and Familiar Style:’ Music Education and Improvised Accompaniment Practices in the U.S., 1820-80.” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 32, no. 2 (2011): 122–44. Kelley, Robin D. G. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk.’” The American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (1992): 1400–1408. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. 1st ed. New York : Knopf, 1985. Kheshti, Roshanak. Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music. New York and London: New York University Press, 2015. Kū Haʻaheo Music Video, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbMX_LoT_YA. Kumu Hina - Ku Ha’aheo on Mauna Kea, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q- UB3XwiPzs. Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. University of Chicago Press, 1994. Lewis, George H. “Storm Blowing from Paradise: Social Protest and Oppositional Ideology in Popular Hawaiian Music.” Popular Music 10, no. 1 (1991): 53–67. Dye 198

Lewis, Nghana tamu. “The Rhetoric of Mobility, the Politics of Consciousness: Julia Mood Peterkin and the Case of a White Black Writer.” African American Review 38, no. 4 (2004): 589. Liliuokalani. Hawaii’s Story, by Hawaii’s Queen. Honolulu, Hawaii: Mutual Publishing, 1990. Lomax, John A, and Ruby T Lomax. “1939 Southern Recording Trip Fieldnotes,” 1939. John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip (AFC 1939/001). American Folklife Center. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afcss39.fn0001. Love, Nancy S. “Back to the Future: Trendy Fascism, the Trump Effect, and the Alt- Right.” New Political Science 39, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 263–68. Luomala, Katharine. “Martha Warren Beckwith. A Commemorative Essay.” The Journal of American Folklore 75, no. 298 (1962): 341–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/538369. Mark, Joan T. A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Marques, A. “Music in Hawai’i Nei.” In Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1886, edited by Thomas G. Thrum, 12:51–60. A Handbook of Information on Matters Relating to the Hawaiian Islands, Original and Selected, of Value to Merchants, Planters, Tourists and Others. Honolulu: Press Publisher Co., 1886. McCandless, Amy Thompson. The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. McDowell, Tremaine. “The Negro in the Southern Novel Prior to 1850.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 25, no. 4 (1926): 455–73. McElya, Micki. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2007. McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. Mileka Lincoln. Crying Police Apologize to Protesters. Facebook video, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/milekalincoln.hnn/videos/breakingnews-hawaii-dlnr- department-of-land-and-natural-resources-agents-just-in/912392835486278/. Moody-Turner, Shirley. Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Newman, Louise Michele. White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Newman, Steve. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular From the Restoration to the New Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Nunn, Erich. Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination. The New Southern Studies; New Southern Studies. Athens, London: The University of Georgia Press, 2015. Olson, Ted, Maureen Mullinax, Burt Feintuch, Michael Ann Williams, Jane Becker, Anthony Harkins, Clifford Murphy, Amanda Fickey, and David Whisnant. “Native and Fine and Enduring: A Roundtable on David Whisnant’s All That Is Dye 199

Native and Fine [with Response].” Journal of Appalachian Studies 16, no. 1/2 (2010): 101–21. Osorio, Jon Kamakawiwoʻole. Dismembering Lãhui : A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002. Parrow, Emily. “The Ballad-Hunter: Juliet Fauntleroy and the Preservation of Virginia’s Folk Music.” Avoca House Museum. Accessed February 8, 2020. http://www.avocamuseum.org/juliet-fauntleroy. Project Kuleana. Kaulana Na Pua. YouTube Video. Accessed June 21, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhibLQFebpQ. Roberts, Helen Heffron. Ancient Hawaiian Music. Dover Edition. New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. ———. “Field Notes on Hawaiian Music,” n.d. Helen H. Roberts Papers (AFC 1979/100), HI-70. Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. ———. “Hawaiian Music.” Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, n.d. Helen H. Roberts Papers (AFC 1979/100), HI-51. Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Robeson, Elizabeth. “The Ambiguity of Julia Peterkin.” The Journal of Southern History 61, no. 4 (1995): 761–86. Scarborough, Dorothy. From a Southern Porch. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919. Shapiro, Henry D. Appalachia On Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Sherman, Mandel, and Thomas R. Henry. Hollow Folk. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell company, 1933. Smith, Catherine Parsons. ““A Distinguishing Virility": Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music.” In Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, edited by Susan Cook and Judy Tsou, 90–106. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Smith, J. Douglas. Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Smith, Jewel A. Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Smith, Mark M. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Smithsonian’s NMNH @NMNH. “As a Collaborator with the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, Frances T. Densmore (1867 – 1957) Dedicated over 50 Years of Her Life to the Recording and Documentation of American Indian Music. #BecauseOfHerStory #WomensHistoryMonth.” Tweet. Twitter, March 5, 2020. https://twitter.com/NMNH/status/1235671593235476493. Solie, Ruth A. Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. Solomon, Olivia, and Jack Solomon, eds. Honey in the Rock: The Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection of Religious Folk Songs from Sumter County, Alabama. Macon, Ga: Mercer University Press, 1992. Dye 200

State Female Normal School. The Focus, March 1911. The Civil Beat Staff. “Candidate Q&A: Office of Hawaiian Affairs Hawaii Island Trustee — Lanakila Mangauil.” Online News Site. Honolulu Civil Beat, October 3, 2020. https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/10/candidate-qa-office-of-hawaiian-affairs- hawaii-island-trustee-lanakila-mangauil/. “The Virginia Folklore Society.” Accessed September 18, 2019. http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/vafolk/. Thomas, Jean. The Traipsin’ Woman. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1933. Thompson, Katrina Dyonne. Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Tick, Judith. “Passed Away Is the Piano Girl: Changes in American Musical Life, 1870- 1900.” In Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, edited by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, 325–48. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Troutman, John. Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Troutman, John William. Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Virginia Folk-Lore Society. “Bulletin,” 1913. https://search.lib.virginia.edu/catalog/u716896. Virginia State Board of Education. Virginia Folk-Lore Society: A Great Movement to Collect and Save to the State and Nation the English and Scottish Ballads Surviving in This Commonwealth. Teachers, Pupils and School Patrons Asked to Help. Richmond: D. Bottom, Superintendent of Public Print, 1914. Wade, Stephen. The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience. University of Illinois Press, 2012. “Wahine Ilikea.” Accessed July 5, 2020. https://www.huapala.org/Wa/Wahine_Ilikea.html. Weiler, Kathleen. Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850-1950. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998. Wesleyan Library Special Collections and Archives. “Guide to the Huapala Collection, 1930-1970.” Wesleyan. Accessed March 19, 2020. https://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/sca/FAs/hu2001-69.xml. Whisnant, David E. All That Is Native & Fine : The Politics of Culture in an American Region. 25th Anniversary Edition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Whitesitt, Linda. “The Role of Women Impresarios in American Concert Life, 1871- 1933.” American Music 7, no. 2 (1989): 159–80. ———. “Women as ‘Keepers of Culture’: Music Clubs, Community Concert Series, and Symphony Orchestras.” In Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860, edited by Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr, 65–86. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Wilgus, D.K. Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959. Dye 201

Williams, Jr., Ronald. “Race, Power, and the Dilemma of Democracy: Hawai’i’s First Territorial Legislature, 1901.” Hawaiian Journal of History 49, no. 1 (2015): 1– 45. https://doi.org/10.1353/hjh.2015.0017. Williams, Michael Ann. Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Williams, Susan Millar. A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Wilson Kimber, Marian. “Women Composers at the White House: The National League of American Pen Women and Phyllis Fergus’s Advocacy for Women in American Music.” Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 4 (November 2018): 477–507. Wolfe, Brendan. “Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930).” In Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, November 4, 2015. https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/racial_integrity_laws_of_the_1920s#start_e ntry. Wolz, Lyn A. “Buchanan, Annabel Morris.” In Dictionary of Virginia Biography, edited by Sara B. Bearss, John T. Kneebone, J. Jefferson Looney, Brent Tarter, and Sandra Gioia Treadway, Vol. 2. Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 2001. The American Folklife Center. “Women Documenting the World: Women as Folklorists, Ethnomusicologists & Fieldworkers.” Accessed February 28, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/folklife/Symposia/womenethnographers/index.html. Wood, Kirsten E. Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Woolfork, Lisa. “Virginia’s Basketball Champs Are Heroes. But Their Victory Isn’t Charlottesville’s ‘Redemption.’” CNN, April 12, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/opinions/university-of-virginia-mens- basketball-charlottesville-woolfork/index.html. Worldwide #Jam4MaunaKea- “Kū Ha’aheo” & “Hawai’i Loa.” Accessed November 8, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Ul5xp4PTg. Zangrando, Robert L. “The NAACP and a Federal Antilynching Bill, 1934-1940.” The Journal of Negro History 50, no. 2 (1965): 106–17.