[1]John Powell’s article “In the Lowlands Low”, in the Southern Folklore Quarterly, Vol. i., No. 1, provides a corrective for those who think loosely of our American music tradition as one observable in the highlands only.
[2]The churchman’s frown on the early intrusion of the folk into hymn making may be seen in The English Hymn by Louis F. Benson, pp. 291ff.
[3]See Warren A. Chandler, Great Revivals and the Great Republic, pp. 109ff. and 138f.
[4]Samuel E. Asbury tells me that the camp meetings at Rock Springs, Lincoln County, North Carolina, which he attended in his youth in the 1880’s had been the “mating grounds” for that state for fifty years.
[5]Compare my article on this subject in The American Mercury of June, 1932.
[6]Anne G. Gilchrist, in her article cited above, assumes this song-book recognition of the revival tunes to have begun in 1842. The height of this activity was, to be sure, around that date, that is, from a decade earlier to a decade later. See JFSS, viii., 63 f.; and compare p. 11 of this work.
[7]The new edition of The Original Sacred Harp, 1936, was not used in making the present collection.
[8]All these books use the country people’s own shape notation, described at length in White Spirituals. See also my article “Buckwheat Notes,” in the Musical Quarterly, xix., No. 4, and the Preface of this book. [9]In Chapter xxi of White Spirituals is the story of how the city-controlled denominations have shown uniformly and increasingly an aversion to the old revival type of song.
[10]The following is a comment made in this connection by John Powell.
“It may be well to remember here that only in comparatively recent times has any distinction been made between the use of already existing material (melodic and thematic) and the use of material created by the composer. The Contrapuntists relied very largely on folk-music for their basic material. Bach followed this example to a great extent; Handel not only did this but took material composed by others at his own sweet will with no thought of deception and with no contemporary reproach of plagiarism. Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms followed frequently the same practice. In the literary field in Elizabethan times it would be difficult to find a play the fundamental material of which was not drawn from already existing sources. The word composer literally means the one who puts together a piece. The material of this piece may, or may not, be invented by such composer. These reflections would seem to explain and to justify the modest claims of the American singing-school book compilers to authorship of songs, and such thoughts should make us approach their labors, not with caviling, but with gratefulness for their invaluable service to American traditional song.”
[11]On examining the first 50 tunes of the Folk-Hymns in this collection, I find within their melodic phrases a total of only 17 jumps of a fifth and 10 of a sixth. Sevenths and octaves—I found but two each—appeared only as the intervals between the end note of one phrase and the beginning note of the following one.
[12]My own hearing of these tunes at the southern country singings has convinced me that the dorian mode is far more widely used than the above statistics, based on the notation, indicate. That is, I have heard the sixth clearly raised in numbers of songs where the key signature called for a flatting.
[13]Observations made in recent years of the folk-tunes in the British Isles show modality to be on the decline. In Germany the modes are already practically gone, with the regular major and minor scales taking their places.
[14]From this statement it will be seen that I hold with those who look on the full diatonic scales as having evolved from the gapped ones, rather than the other way around. This however is still a matter of controversy.
[15]To those who desire to follow in more detail the problem of the essence of the folk-tune, I commend Cecil Sharp’s English Folk-Song, Some Conclusions, especially chapters VI and VII. Despite Sharp’s having come to his “conclusions” thirty years ago and even though they are concerned with the folk-songs of the British Isles only, they have not, to my knowledge, been essentially altered by subsequent thought on the subject; and they apply, by and large, to American folk-tunes as well.
[16]A real defect of this system of cataloguing inheres in the difficulty, sometimes the impossibility, of determining the proper key signatures of gapped tunes. And the difficulty is augmented by the tendency of all the old recorders to regard dorian tunes as natural minor ones (or aeolian). I have reproduced all such doubtful tunes here just as I found them. I have catalogued them, however, (and inserted them here serially according to that catalog arrangement) in an order which is determined by what has seemed to be their proper modal form. Among the songs which are touched by this modal (and hence key-signature) uncertainty are Nos. 20, 21, 22, 37, 51, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 
