Besides having a huge collections of Christmas and other seasonal recordings I have a fairly respectable reference library on the subject of our midwinter musical heritage and the history of its holidays. My most valued book in that collection is undoubtedly my hardcover first edition American Folk Songs for Christmas by Ruth Crawford Seeger, published by Doubleday & Company in 1953.
I don’t mean that it is my most valued book in terms of money, although that might be true too. No, I value it because it is an incredible reference source for me, and with its lovely illustrations by Barbara Cooney and stitched old-fashioned binding is beautiful to look at and use. But most importantly, when I hold it I am holding a true landmark in the overlapping area of the Venn diagram where the circle “authentic folk music” overlaps with the circle “Christmas music”. If I valued it for its monetary worth I would be sensible and stop using it so much: I would buy one of the now readily-available modestly priced reprints that Loomis House Publishing released in 2013 and keep my first edition safely on the shelf.
To learn more about both Ruth and her books I recommend this extended review
Ruth Crawford Seeger was a music teacher (as well as a member of one of the English language’s most important folk music families.) In those days one of the standard obligations of any music teacher was to organize a Christmas presentation as a showcase for her students’ families. The standard format was either a on-stage recital or a Nativity Story pageant featuring the familiar Christmas carols. But Ruth, who had trained as an folklorist had a different idea for the events.
I don’t know if it was from her own early field research, or from her husband the renowned ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, or from their friends John and Allan Lomax that Ruth first learned about the rural tradition of “Watch Night.” They were all-night community vigils of singing, dancing and feasting on Christmas Eve while waiting for the Morning Star to appear. She saw that re-enacting that sort of event would be a perfect way both to replace the over-used Christmas show formats and to disseminate authentic Christmas folk songs instead of the standard carols.
So she set about researching to find actual folk songs to put in this book which was clearly intended to be a resource for other music teachers. As a recital or pageant replacement it didn’t catch on, but it sure created an incredibly valuable trove of authentic songs for Christmas concerts and recordings by American folksingers during the Folk Revival of the late 1950s and ‘60s, and ever since then. And because Ruth was scrupulous about identifying the sources from where she got the songs it is a great resource for me to learn where these songs came from.
Singing in the Land is on page 64 of her book. Ruth says she got the song from CPS, which the legend tells me is a songbook called Calhoun Plantation Songs compiled by Emily Hallowell and published in 1907 by C.W. Thompson & Co. of Boston. It was a songbook of the Calhoun Coloured School, a boarding school for the children and grandchildren of former slaves that had been founded in 1892 by two women from New England in partnership with Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute.
The school was established to provide education to rural black students during the Jim Crow era, when Alabama did not allow them to attend public schools. The songbook documents songs sung by the children, brought to the school from the plantations where they grew up, not mainstream songs for them to learn. My quick scan through it online suggests that they appear to be the “jubilee” style of songs sung by ex-slaves during the optimistic era right after the Civil War and Emancipation, and not songs from plantations during the days of slavery.
Singing in the Land is sung here by Elizabeth Mitchell along with family and musical friends who live in the folk-music rich upper Hudson River Valley, near Woodstock. It comes from a wonderful 2013 album The Sounding Joy distributed by Smithsonian Folkways that features primarily songs from Ruth Crawford Seeger’s book. Elizabeth is joined here in singing by such well-known folkies as Natalie Merchant, Happy and Artie Traum, Ruthy Ungar and John Sebastian.
