"Folk Songs of Middle Tennessee ... is superior to most collections
because Boswell cast a wide net in his collecting, recording many
items from people not usually thought of as folksingers, and
because, unlike most collectors of his day, he was equally skilled
at music and lyric transcription". -- W. K. McNeil, The Ozark Folk
Center
This volume brings together, for the first time, more than one
hundred traditional songs from Middle Tennessee -- a region that is
synonymous in the popular mind with music but one that has been
curiously neglected in folksong scholarship. The songs presented
here were originally collected in the late 1940s and early 1950s by
George Boswell, a distinguished scholar and field researcher who
died in 1995.
While living in Nashville, Boswell scoured the city and
surrounding counties for old ballads and folk songs.
Sometimes using a wire or tape recorder, at other times
employing a stenographer, he visited numerous singers and
transcribed the words and tunes to hundreds of songs. Even after
moving from Tennessee to assume a teaching position at the
University of Mississippi, Boswell continued to work on his
collection, annotating and comparing texts, and publishing
occasional samples. In 1950, he noted that Tennessee, virtually
alone among southern states, had no published collection of its
folk songs. That has remained the case until now.
The songs chosen for this book are presented with musical
notation and extensive backgound notes, including biographical data
on the original informants (many of whom were business and
professional people) and fascinating histories of each song. A
number of the songs are rare and previously uncollected; others
arelocal variants of long-popular ballads. The publication of this
volume -- the first major collection of southern folk songs in many
years -- is not only a testament to Boswell's scholarship but a
marvelous contribution to our understanding of southern folk
culture and the ways in which it has interacted with popular
culture.
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