Here in Waco for a family Christmas, having flown in on Monday. Marking papers all the way; grades submitted for the 10AM deadline yesterday. So Merry Christmas!
In odd (early AM) moments here, I’ve done some ballad hunting, searching for forgotten prairie ballads in newspapers.com using search phrases according to the older tunes appropriated by local balladeers. Ballad authors seldom composed melodies; when they needed one, they appropriated it–from a Civil War song, from a popular song, or from a Protestant hymn, commonly. A newspaper would publish contributed ballads with a notation something like, Air: Beulah Land or Air: Marching Through Georgia.
Using the search phrase Air: Greenland’s Icy Mountain, I came up with a real gem: “The Housewife’s Burden,” by Thomas Chalmers McConnell, as published in the Holton Tribune, 24 March 1988. McConnell, who was proud of his Scots-Irish lineage, was a notable character: a piano dealer, a Republican songster (composing campaign songs and organizing singing ensembles for party meetings), a locally notorious poet, a newspaper editor (Holton Tribune), and Jackson County clerk. He wrote a song from a woman’s point of view, a comic but pointed ballad about a woman struggling through daily life with a husband who was idle, a drunkard, and a politician to boot. This newfound ballad is destined for treatment in the Willow Creek Folk School and in a Plains Folk Kansas column.
Take up the housewife's burden
Tis morn, go milk the cow
Then, using the search phrase Air: Little Old Log Cobin, I unearthed two more forgotten ballads.
First, “The Man Between the Handles on the Plow,” a dandy Populist ballad by one W. W. Kirby, published in the Mound City Republic, 24 August 1893. Both author and ballad are previously unfamiliar to me. I need to research this guy Kirby. If he wrote one ballad, he probably wrote others.
For the strength of every nation is the toiler of the soil
And the man with honest sweat upon his brow
And after that, “An Old Time Song,” an early ballad of nostalgia about the trail ranch and whiskey outpot of Reynolds, a.k.a. Rath City, in the Texas Panhandle. The author listed is “A.H.,” location Colorado. So, someone formerly asociated with tbe buffalo hunting outpost of Reynolds who is now relocated to Colorado, initials A.H.
I never more shall see the men who daily passed my door
That much derided member of the Grange
And the brave and rugged hunter who roamed the prairies e'er
As he chased the noble Bison on the Range
My intermittent efforts in songcatching confirm the search strategy I first tried some months ago, using the song titles of tunes appropriated by prairie balladeers. This should produce many more ballads to come. The gifts keep on giving.