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The Ruth Crawford Seeger Sessions

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The Ruth Crawford Seeger Sessions The Ruth Crawford Seeger Sessions Ellie M. Hisama Abstract: Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953), an American experimental composer active in the 1920s and 1930s, devoted the second half of her career to transcribing, arranging, performing, teaching, and writing about American folk music. Many works from Crawford Seeger’s collections for children, including “Nineteen American Folk Songs” and “American Folk Songs for Children,” are widely sung and recorded, but her monumental efforts to publish them often remain unacknowledged. This article underscores the link between her work in American traditional music and Bruce Springsteen’s best-selling 2006 album “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” in order to give Crawford Seeger due credit for her contribu- tions. By examining her prose writings and song settings, this article illuminates aspects of her thinking about American traditional music and elements of her unusual and striking arrangements, which were deeply informed by her modernist ear. Of his 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Bruce Springsteen remarked: “Growing up as a rock ’n’ roll kid, I didn’t know a lot about Pete’s music or the depth of his influence. So I headed to the record store and came back with an armful of Pete Seeger records. Over the next few days of listening, the wealth of songs, their rich- ness and power changed what I thought I knew about ‘folk music.’ Hearing this music and our ini- tial ’97 session for Pete’s record sent me off, casually at ½rst, on a quest.”1 A tribute to a key ½gure in the folk revival, Springsteen’s recording stirs up discussion about ELLIE M. HISAMA is Professor of the complex processes of transmission and influ- Music at Columbia University. ence in American traditional music. His rendition She is the author of Gendering on We Shall Overcome of several traditional Ameri- Musical Modernism: The Music of can tunes, such as “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and “John Henry,” “Erie Canal,” “Buffalo Gals,” and “Old Miriam Gideon (2001) and coeditor Dan Tucker,” can be traced back ½ve decades to of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Pete Seeger, who ½rst recorded them in the 1950s.2 Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth- Century American Music (with Ray The renewed interest in Pete Seeger spurred by Allen, 2007) and Critical Minded: Springsteen’s Grammy-winning, best-selling album New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies and his international Seeger Sessions tours has (with Evan Rapport, 2005). unfortunately not extended to another Seeger, © 2013 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00236 51 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed_a_00236 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Ruth Ruth Crawford Seeger, who brought travel for extended periods given her Crawford numerous children’s songs to Pete’s family responsibilities. But her contribu- Seeger Sessions attention and whose songbooks Pete tions to American traditional music are knew.3 Peggy Seeger, Pete’s sister, has many and include her painstaking work observed that several of the songs on in transcribing tunes collected by the Bruce Springsteen’s album are ones Pete Lomaxes; her brilliant and original got straight from her mother, who was arrangements of American traditional Pete’s stepmother.4 music in her songbooks for children; her An American avant-garde composer, teaching of these songs through her work Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953) was with young children (including her own also a gifted transcriber and arranger of family); and her extensive written com- American traditional music from the mentary on many aspects of folksong mid-1930s until her premature death transcription and performance, valuable from cancer.5 Springsteen’s lively Seeger for both scholars and teachers of young Sessions is a laudable project (Pete Seeger musicians. This essay focuses on her called it “a great honor”6), but it is unfor- work as an arranger of and writer on folk tunate that most fans of the album and of songs, with the hope that it will spur fur- Springsteen’s performances of the songs ther research on her transcribing, arrang- associate the “Seeger” in the album’s title ing, and writing. with only the most widely known mem- ber of the Seeger family. Although Craw- In her memoir Sing It Pretty, folk musi- ford Seeger is now entering the “canon” cian and researcher Bess Lomax Hawes of twentieth-century Western art music recalls Crawford Seeger’s work in tran- through several doors–as an American scription: composer, as a female composer, and as I marveled at her strategies. She took over an innovator and experimentalist–she only a little corner of a downstairs room should surely be lauded for the remark- and assembled a recording machine, a rack able contributions she made to American for the discs, a tiny desk, and a professional traditional music, work that continues to architect’s drafting board on which she attract musicians and listeners.7 I return eventually copied her completed musical to the well of Crawford Seeger’s song col- transcriptions in a gorgeous kind of pen- lections from which Pete Seeger dipped manship. She used pots of the blackest his bucket in an effort to establish a link India ink and large thick sheets of the from Springsteen’s powerful album back whitest music manuscript paper. Her to Crawford Seeger, who listened and minuscule desk contained pencils, note transcribed, notated and arranged, de - paper, and separate sheets on which she scribed and published hundreds of songs made a tick mark every time she listened to that continue to be sung and circulated each song she transcribed–eighty or ninety around the globe.8 In doing so, I hope to times, some of them.10 draw the attention of another generation of musicians, listeners, and scholars to Crawford Seeger’s songbooks not only Crawford Seeger, a critical ½gure in the preserved and interpreted American tra- folk revival whose contributions deserve ditional music, but they also helped recognition.9 establish its importance at a time rife Unlike Cecil Sharp or John and Alan with imitations of the original music, Lomax, Crawford Seeger was not a col- watered down to make it palatable to lis- lector of folksongs, as she was unable to teners comfortable with sugary songs but 52 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed_a_00236 by guest on 27 September 2021 unaccustomed to whole-grain musical took a distinct turn toward contrapuntal, Ellie M. victuals. As Peggy Seeger and her brother linear organization, which can be heard Hisama Mike Seeger noted of Crawford Seeger’s in her celebrated String Quartet 1931, Piano American Folk Songs for Children: Study in Mixed Accents, and other works dating from 1930 onward. A remarkably When our mother made this collection of fresh voice in what was known as “ultra- 94 songs in the 1940s, “folk” had not yet modern” composition during the 1920s made it into the charts, discs, the concert and 1930s, Crawford composed relatively circuits–or into the national consciousness. few works, which include a small but It was still associated with the rural back- meticulously crafted group of songs, woods and at that time folk-as-the-folk- pieces for solo piano, a string quartet, and sang-it was a really new sound.. Standard various chamber ensembles.15 musical fare for children . was digested so The year 1932 was a turning point for many times by censors and music editors Crawford, as the professional strands of that the resulting product was cultural pap: her work continued to intertwine with gone the meat, bones, nerves, muscles, the personal. She married Charles Seeger, heart.11 and the ½rst of her four children, Michael According to Hawes, “[M]ost people at (Mike), was born in 1933. Not coinciden- the time [of Crawford Seeger’s work on tally, she stopped composing around the Our Singing Country during the late 1930s] time her children were born, a “decision thought of the folksong as simple, natural, born of indecision” as she phrased it, and naive, spontaneous, self-generated, and a professional move regretted by many de½nitely crude.”12 Crawford Seeger admirers of her compositions.16 The noted that she was “disturbed by the Great Depression deeply affected Ruth sweetness and lack of backbone in nursery and Charles Seeger’s views about their songs.”13 Her exacting transcriptions, continued involvement with modernist the result of listening to a recording music. From the mid-1930s to the early dozens of times, communicated a new, 1950s, Crawford Seeger shifted the focus ethical vision of American traditional of her work to traditional American music, one that tried to remain true to music, teaching at a number of area the music as it was then performed. schools in addition to working as a music For someone who contributed such a editor for the Lomaxes and publishing rich lode to American traditional music, song collections of her own. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s training as a clas- Musicologists, composers, and theorists sical musician is unusual. Born in 1901 in of twentieth-century music and of Amer- East Liverpool, Ohio, Crawford grew up ican music have worked to recover Craw- in Florida and studied piano, music theory, ford’s compositions, wanting to balance and composition in Chicago, where she the historical record with regard to women met writer and poet Carl Sandburg and composers and to explore noteworthy yet taught piano to his daughters.14 Moving little-known music. Thanks to these ef - to New York in 1929 drew her into the forts, students can now encounter Craw- heady world of modernist music and art, ford’s compositions in their music lessons, and brought her music to the attention of courses, textbooks, and anthologies.17 important musical ½gures of the day, Her transcriptions and arrangements of including Henry Cowell, Marion Bauer, traditional music–many drawn from her and Charles Seeger.
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