Watch as Natalie Merchant Sings the Treasures of a Nation–Including AFC Archival Treasures

The week of June 13, 2024, was Natalie Merchant week at the Library of Congress. The singer, songwriter, activist, and folklife advocate helped us mark the opening of the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery with a very special “Live! at the Library” concert presentation, which you can watch below. Around the concert, she spent a week in residence at the Library doing research, meeting with staff, and participating in our June Family Day activities, including a family sing-along, which we’ll post as Part 2 of this blog post  later this week.

Merchant, who fronted the band 10,000 Maniacs during its most successful years and went on to a solo career of sustained depth and brilliance, has long been an enthusiast and advocate of traditional folk music. In recognition of this, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer appointed her to the American Folklife Center’s board of trustees in 2022. She has since been serving in this important leadership and advisory role, while also dreaming up new ways to help the Center further its mission–including this concert.

Alongside a few of Natalie’s own compositions, and a few old popular compositions, the concert featured mostly traditional folksongs which have connections to the unparalleled archival collections of the American Folklife Center. Natalie had already researched some of these songs before her time on the Center’s Board of Trustees, and in the run-up to the concert she enlisted my help to find some of the deeper connections between these songs and the American Folklife Center archive. For a few weeks before the concert, we worked together by email to find out as much as we could. Natalie distilled that research down into her spoken introductions for each song, as well as a mesmerizing slideshow of images and sound clips from the archive, which you can see in the concert video.

I’ve put some of the fuller stories behind each song into this blog. You’ll find those stories below the video, along with the complete archival audio tracks wherever possible.

Needless to say, you should definitely watch the whole concert video first. You’ll appreciate not only Natalie’s amazing research but (of course) her incredible, powerful singing. You’ll also appreciate the work of her amazing band of folk music veterans, put together just for this occasion: Kevin Wimmer (fiddle & singing), Richie Stearns (banjo & singing), Jackson Fitzgerald (acoustic guitar), Alex Lacquement (upright bass), and Matty Gordon (percussion, harmonica, dancing). Watch the video immediately below!

 

Collection Connections

Throughout her time at the Library, Natalie was enthusiastic about exploring archival sources to enrich her concerts. Here you’ll find background research and links to archival collections at the Library of Congress connected to the songs and the traditions Natalie drew upon for her concert.

Before getting into the individual songs, here is Natalie Merchant’s online home. That’s where you can keep up with news of her latest release, Keep Your Courage, and of upcoming appearances and other projects.

Now on to the songs and their collection connections!

Liza Jane

Natalie learned “Liza Jane” from the folksinger Elizabeth Mitchell, whose version you can hear at this link. She asked for some archival versions from the American Folklife Center, selected her favorite, and began her concert with a special treat: she synced up a video from the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center’s Paper Print Collection with the recording, which features Johnny Mae Medlock, Gussie Slater, and Ruth Hines in the women’s penitentiary in Raiford, Florida in 1939. The silent film she used is at this link. (Note that the film employs an offensive word in its historical title, which does not reflect the views of Natalie Merchant or the Library of Congress.) The recording is below. Make sure you see it in the concert video and listen to what Natalie has to say about it, too!

Song of Himself

This is a song Natalie wrote about Walt Whitman. It’s from her latest release, Keep Your Courage, and you can hear the album version here. As you heard in the concert, she absolutely loves Whitman’s poetry and life story. She thinks about him especially in politically divided times, because of his role as a healer during the Civil War. As Natalie mentions in the concert, the Library of Congress has the largest collection of Whitman-related archival materials in the world. Your best first step in accessing these resources is this online collections guide.

In the concert Natalie speaks about her favorite photo of Whitman, which I’ve placed above. The Library of Congress has many other photos of Whitman, and you can see some of them at this link. Natalie’s visit to the Library to experience our Whitman-related treasures was further detailed in this blog post from my colleague Barbara Bair.

Motherland

Another of Natalie’s original songs, this was the title track of her third solo album in 2001. It has since been covered by Joan Baez and Christy Moore. Hear Natalie’s album version here.

Owensboro

Natalie learned this song years ago from Olin Downes and Elie Siegmeister’s book A Treasury of American Song, where it is set in Owensboro, Kentucky, and given the title “I Lived in a Town.” She recorded it on her album The House Carpenter’s Daughter, and you can hear the album version here.

Because the song is about working conditions in textile mills, Natalie decided to create a slideshow of images from one of her favorite photographers, Lewis Hine, who worked for the National Child Labor Committee in the 1920s, documenting labor conditions for child workers. You can find the archival collection of his photos here.

The song has an interesting history too, which Natalie and I researched; most versions are set in Buffalo, South Carolina, and called either “A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme” or “Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine.” The lyrics were first published in 1930 by the activist and novelist Grace Lumpkin, who heard the song in Charlotte, North Carolina, from a cotton mill worker named Mr. McDonald. McDonald said the words had been composed by a millworker he had known in Buffalo years before. (See Lumpkin’s original text and note on page 8 of this large pdf.) Lumpkin then incorporated the song into her novel To Make My Bread.

In his book Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes, Archie Green showed that the tune was added by actor and folksinger Will Geer, when the novel was turned into the Broadway play Let Freedom Ring. Geer was cast as the ballad-singing “Grandpap,” in a role reminiscent of his iconic turn as TV’s Grandpa Walton 40 years later. Geer had used the tune for his own song “Ballad of the Wives and Widows of the Presidents and Dictators,” often known as “Warren Harding’s Widow,” before using it for “A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme.” He said he heard the tune sung as part of a traditional song called “Poor Boy” in West Virginia by a woman named Edith Mackie.

Downes and Siegmeister’s headnote for “I Lived in a Town” failed to indicate their source, mentioning only that a text of the song was quoted in Lumpkin’s novel. Since the novel presents a different text and no tune, Downes and Siegmeister clearly got their text and tune somewhere else, but declined to say where.

Once again, Archie Green provides the most likely answer, showing that “A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme” was spread through the folksong community, especially in New York, through manuscript copies of a book of protest songs compiled in the late 1930s by Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger; the book would eventually become Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. Copies of the manuscript were available in the library of the People’s Songs organization in New York, as well as in the private hands of many folksingers. It’s likely that Downes and Siegmeister combined Lumpkin’s text with a redaction of the Hard Hitting Songs manuscript, since they were New York folksong enthusiasts who knew Lomax, Guthrie, and Seeger as well as many other singers. (See them both in Alan Lomax’s Christmas card list for 1940!)

Downes and Siegmeister were known to obfuscate the sources of their songs, to the point that both John A. Lomax and Woody Guthrie considered suing them, complaining that the authors reprinted their published songs without attribution. Their choice to move the song to Kentucky and change its title thus seems designed to make their use of the Lomax/ Seeger/ Guthrie manuscript more difficult to trace.

Later versions of the Hard Hitting Songs manuscript left out Lumpkin’s name, claiming instead that Will Geer had collected the words as well as the tune in West Virginia. Archie Green thought this hoax was perpetuated by Geer himself, who also sometimes claimed to have written the song outright. Pete Seeger clearly believed Geer had collected both words and music, and repeated it in the liner notes to American Industrial Ballads (find a pdf here), on which he recorded his own version of the song. Woody Guthrie didn’t record “A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme,” but in 1945 he adapted the tune for “Ludlow Massacre,” featuring his own words about a coal mining strike.

Our most interesting collection connection, meanwhile, shows that in the late 1930s Alan Lomax at least was aware of both Lumpkin’s and Geer’s roles in crafting the song: this copy of the Hard Hitting Songs manuscript has a version of the song, followed by a page with Alan’s handwritten notes on it, trying to trace the words and music to the versions by Grace Lumpkin and Will Geer.

The Devil’s Nine Questions

Natalie learned this song from a printed source, which was clearly related to our archival version sung by Texas Gladden. Hear it in the player below!

Before we address this song, you can find many more recordings of Texas Gladden online here. And there’s much more information about Texas Gladden herself, in the form of these liner notes written by Alan Lomax, who cryptically signs himself “A. Lx.”

In Francis James Child’s standard reference work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, “The Devil’s Nine Questions” has the distinction of being Child 1, the first ballad in his numbering system. Child called it “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” and you can read his entry on this ballad at this link. The Roud Index numbers it 161.

In this ballad, a young woman is confronted by the Devil, who challenges her to answer his riddles. By answering correctly, she escapes his power. In this form, the song goes back to about 1450. A manuscript version from around that time (Rawlinson Manuscript. D. 328, fol. 174 b, Bodleian Library) features the Latin title “Inter Diabolus Et Virgo” (“Between the Devil and the Maiden”), but the lyrics are in Middle English. In that version, the Devil promises that if the maiden becomes his lover, he will teach her all the wisdom of the world, and proceeds to ask her riddles. She first prays to Jesus for help, then answers all his riddles correctly. She finishes by telling him to be still and vowing not to speak with him anymore! Remarkably, several of the riddles in the manuscript of 1450 are the same ones sung by modern singers, including Natalie. Read the Middle English version here. More modern versions of the song sometimes omit the courtship aspect, so that the young woman is riddling for her soul. Others omit any overt reference that the suitor is the Devil, so that her correct answers win her the suitor’s hand in marriage!

The version Natalie drew on was sung by Texas Gladden for Alan and Elizabeth Lomax in Salem, Virginia, in 1941. It was learned by Gladden from Alfreda Peel, herself a folklorist, who had collected it twice from Mrs. Rill Martin, also in Salem, in 1922 and 1933. The 1922 text was published in Arthur Kyle Davis’s Traditional Ballads of Virginia, and the 1933 text in his More Traditional Ballads of Virginia. Alfreda Peel did not have a recording machine on either occasion, and collected the song both by writing it down and by learning to sing it herself. Years after collecting it, Peel sang her version for Arthur Kyle Davis, who made two recordings of her singing it, which you can hear at this link. Peel also realized the song might die out if no one else learned it, so when she found the brilliant ballad singer Texas Gladden, she taught Gladden “The Devil’s Nine Questions.”

Gladden’s version is not about courtship. The Devil is deciding whether the young woman is “God’s” or “one of mine,” suggesting instead the convention of God and the Devil competing for people’s souls. In Gladden’s song, the woman defeats the Devil and he declares, “You are God’s and none of mine.” In Natalie’s interpretation, the Devil’s opponent is a young girl, which is fully consistent with Texas Gladden’s text.

When They Ring the Golden Bells for You and Me

Natalie closed her classic album Ophelia with this song, which she learned from a recording of the Reverend Alfred Grant Karnes. A Baptist preacher and gospel singer, Karnes recorded for A & R pioneer Ralph Peer at the 1927 “Bristol Sessions” in Virginia, the famous sessions where Peer also discovered Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, among others. Karnes was the only old-time musician of that generation who played the harp-guitar, an instrument before that associated mostly with classical music. However, on his gospel recordings he played the instrument more or less like a regular guitar, without employing the sub-bass strings. You can hear that recording at this link.

The Library of Congress also has a version of this song in the National Jukebox by the Imperial Quartet, which you can hear in the player below.

Natalie is particularly fascinated by the song’s author, Daniel de Marbelle, better known as “Dion de Marbelle.” Born in about 1818 in France, de Marbelle sailed on whaling ships, immigrated to the U.S., joined up as a drummer in the Civil War, worked as the first clown in Bailey’s circus, was an accomplished magician, and helped Buffalo Bill organize his Wild West Shows. De Marbelle was also a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter. You can read about him in this 1955 news article (top center of the page) drawing on “old files of the Elgin Courier-News.” It includes a drawing of de Marbelle dressed as a circus clown composing “When They Ring the Golden Bells” with a quill pen.

Weeping Pilgrim

Natalie learned this 1859 shape-note hymn by J.P. Reese from a printing of The Original Sacred Harp. You can see the notation in this printing of the book from 1911. Natalie recorded it on her album The House Carpenter’s Daughter, and you can hear the album version here.

The shape-note or Sacred Harp singing tradition is a vibrant American tradition of group hymn-singing, and AFC has many shape-note resources online. Your first stop is our recently published research guide Shape-Note Singing: Resources in the American Folklife Center, which contains links to shape-note recordings in several collections online at the Library of Congress website. We also have many audio recordings online at the Library’s website, which you can find at this link. In addition to those collections, 179 audio and video selections of shape-note singing from our Alan Lomax collection are available from the Association for Cultural Equity’s Lomax Digital Archive.

We don’t appear to have a version of “Weeping Pilgrim” online, but the song shares the idea of the narrator as a pilgrim in a foreign land with many other sprirituals, including one we have in many versions, known as “I’m a Pilgrim” or sometimes “I Am a Pilgrim.”

Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies

This song is also sometimes known as “Fair and Tender Maidens” and sometimes as “Little Sparrow.”  Natalie doesn’t remember where she first heard it, which isn’t that surprising, since it was a standard of country and folk before she was born, sung by such singers as Maybelle Carter and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk. The American Folklife Center has many recordings of this Appalachian lyric song, starting with a cylinder recording of Effie Matthews of Dillsboro, North Carolina, made by Robert Winslow Gordon on October 28, 1925, which may be the earliest sound recording of the song. But Natalie felt that for the slideshow there was no more iconic performance than Jean Ritchie’s.

Jean Ritchie was one of the leading Appalachian folksingers for about 70 years; you can read more about her here. Jean’s 1954 commercial recording was one of the earliest versions of the song released to the public. But Natalie was more interested in the way Jean sang it socially, which is captured on several American Folklife Center field recordings. Natalie remarks in the concert about Jean’s simple and natural singing style.

Below find three recordings of this song sung by Jean Ritchie. They show that, even on an unaccompanied traditional song like this one, Jean varied her performance style depending on her audience; the simple, floating notes of the recordings she made for Alan Lomax in his apartment are different from the more deliberate and performative sound of her album track, or her 1966 Newport Folk Festival rendition. Listen and compare in the players below!

First, hear Jean sing for Alan Lomax in his apartment in 1948.

Next, hear a different version of the words, but still her more relaxed, private style, in 1949.

Finally, hear Jean perform the song for a festival audience in 1966.

Wheel of Fortune

I’ll publish the collection connections for “Wheel of Fortune” in Part 2 of this blog post later this week.  Stay Tuned!

Come Take a Trip In My Airship

The story behind “Come Take a Trip In My Airship” will also be in Part 2.

Risselty Rosselty

Natalie learned this song from Pete Seeger, whose version you can hear at this link. Pete learned it from his stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, a pioneering American composer who also specialized in transcribing traditional folksongs. Legend has it she spent some time transcribing recordings for the Lomaxes’ book Our Singing Country here in the attic of the Jefferson Buillding, where I’m writing these notes! Ruth had a particularly strong interest in children’s songs and compiled several books of them, as well as teaching them to her four children.

According to Ruth’s son Mike Seeger, writing in this liner note pdf, the family’s source for “Risselty Rosselty” was a field recording of Ray R. Denoon, which is now in the American Folklife Center archive. Mike remembers listening to the recording as a child; you can hear it in the player below!

Born Riesn Ray Denoon, the singer known as Ray R. Denoon had a family string band that included his sons Ray R. Denoon Jr. and James Bern Denoon. Sidney Robertson Cowell recorded all three of them for the Resettlement Administration in 1936, including Ray’s version of “Risselty Rosselty.” Cowell’s supervisor overseeing the fieldwork was the muiscologist Charles Seeger, who was also Ruth Crawford Seeger’s husband. Library of Congress folklorist Benjamin Botkin published the following transcription of Denoon’s performance, which he attributed to Charles, though it was just as likely done by Ruth.

Ruth Crawford Seeger taught this song to several of her children and stepchildren. In addition to Pete, Mike Seeger recorded it, as did Peggy Seeger. In 1939, Ruth used it as the basis for an orchestral composition, which you can hear here.

The song itself is descended from the old British ballad known as “The Wife Wrapt in Wether’s Skin” or “The Cooper of Fife,” which often has the refrain “Nickety Nackety Now Now Now.” Those earlier versions are quite misogynistic—the husband is angered by the wife’s laziness, so he wraps his wife in a sheepskin and then beats her, while claiming he is just softening his sheepskin. We are thankful that in children’s versions like “Risselty Rosselty,” that violent part is left out.

Jennie Jenkins

I’ll publish the collection connections for “Jennie Jenkins” in Part 2 of this blog post later this week.  Stay Tuned!

Old Shoes & Leggings

The story behind “Old Shoes & Leggings” will also be in Part 2, including a recording of Natalie’s source, Uncle Eck Dunford, talking about where he learned it!

Where Shall I Be When the First Trumpet Sounds?

Natalie discovered the Nova Scotia version of this song while doing research in the American Folklife Center archive on a different project. I provided her with two more versions, which she included in her slideshow. In researching the background and history on the song, which seems to date to the end of the 19th century, Natalie turned up this very useful article at Hymnology Archive.

The first version Natalie heard was collected by the great Canadian folklorist Helen Creighton at the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children in 1943. As Natalie says in the concert, the home was an institution at which children suffered abuse, neglect, and racism, for which the government of Nova Scotia formally apologized in 2014. Helen Creighton collected there as part of a larger project to document songs in Nova Scotia in 1943 and 1944, and her original discs came to the Library of Congress in 1944. But Creighton acquired tape copies, and those copies are online at this link at the Nova Scotia Archives.

Hear residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children sing “Where Shall I be When the First Trumpet Sounds” at this link.

Hear Reverend E.M. Martin, Pearline Johns, and others sing the song for Alan Lomax and Lewis Jones in the back room of Nelson’s Funeral Home in Clarksdale Mississippi on July 23, 1942, in the player below or at this link. In this version, note the verse about God’s covenant after the flood: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, means no more water, it’s fire next time.” This couplet, which appears widely in African American spirituals, gave James Baldwin the title for his book The Fire Next Time.

Hear the Maple Springs Baptist Church congregation featuring Isaac Neely sing the song for Lomax and Jones in Medon, Tennessee on August 26, 1941, in the player below or at this link.

Hopalong Peter

I’ll publish the collection connections for “Hopalong Peter” in Part 2 of this blog post later this week, including a guide to our resources on the New Lost City Ramblers, a version from an 1876 songster, and a picture of The Aristocratic Pigs!

Until Next Time…

Thanks for watching, listening, and reading! We were delighted with Natalie’s concert, and we hope you feel the same. We’ll publish Part 2 of this blog post later this week, including Natalie’s sing-along with kids and the remaining stories behind the songs!

For information on current concerts, visit the Folklife Concerts page at Concerts from the Library of Congress. Visit the Library’s calendar for upcoming Live! at the Library events.