More about “The Dodger”: New Evidence about one of Aaron Copland’s “Old American Songs”

African American singer William Warfield and Jewish American composer Aaron Copland look at music on a music stand. — Aaron Copland (right) goes over music with the great baritone William Warfield, ca. 1963. Photo by Victor Kraft. Warfield premiered Copland’s version of “The Dodger” in the 1950s.[http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/copland.phot0036 ]

Note: this is the second in a series of posts about a classic item from the AFC archive, “The Dodger.” [See the first post here.] [See the second post here.][See the third post here.]

Second note: we’ve also created a podcast version of these stories. Download our “Dodger” podcast here!

In this post, I’ll present some exciting new evidence about the history of an important American folksong, “The Dodger.” It significantly changes our understanding of the story of “The Dodger,” showing the song to be older than was previously known. It also shows that the song was known in England before America, and that similar songs in Australian folk tradition owe their roots to the same English sources.

In a previous post, I outlined the history of “The Dodger” in American folk music, and the importance of AFC’s archival recordings of the song. As I said there, “The Dodger” is a recognized American classic, recorded by such groups as The Almanac Singers and the Weavers, and arranged by Aaron Copland into a standard of the American art-music vocal repertoire, as part of his first set of Old American Songs. All these popular renditions were based on a version recorded in 1936, which is now part of the American Folklife Center’s archive.

Let’s refresh our memories by listening to that version, sung by Mrs. Emma Dusenbury for Sidney Robertson Cowell of the Resettlement Administration:

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Let’s also hear Thomas Hampson’s rendition of Copland’s arrangement, which was based on Mrs. Dusenbury’s recording:

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“The Dodger” is a good song to be exploring in the run-up to an election. Charles Seeger, who first published the song for the U.S. Government’s Resettlement Administration, said in an oral history interview that it stemmed from electoral politics:

This song […] was a Democratic campaign song of the election of 1884, between Cleveland and Blaine, which was a very dirty election in which Blaine was charged with having been a dodger in the Civil War–that is, paying somebody to take his place in the army.

An elderly woman in a white dress standing in a doorway and looking upward. — Emma Dusenbury, whose version of “The Dodger” became a celebrated song by Aaron Copland. Sidney Robertson Cowell took this photo and wrote on the back: “The blind folk singer Emma Dusenbury, a quite imperial old lady. At her doorway near Mena, Arkansas, 1938. She & her daughter Ora (“Ory”) were living on her $12 a month pension as the widow of a Civil War veteran–her husband had enlisted as a drummer at the age of 13 or 14.” LC Music Division, Sidney Robertson Cowell Collection.

Given Seeger’s claim, it’s an interesting wrinkle that, of the four traditional versions in the AFC archive, only one singer, Mrs. Dusenbury, included “The Candidate” as one of the dodgers. This suggests that perhaps the song originated before the campaign, and “the candidate” was added to a pre-existing folksong in order to ridicule Blaine.

So, where and when did “The Dodger” take recognizable form? Seeger’s memoirs show that he had a theory about that too:

It’s a nice song, a parody of that type of thing which was probably produced in one of the early agrarian reform movements in the country; it might have been the Grange, it might have been any farmers’ organization.

Later scholars all seem to have