Songnotes

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A Companion to the Old Town School Songbook

Compiled and edited byMark Dvorak.

Camptown Races

All over the world, Stephen Foster is recognized as America's first great songwriter. He is commonly identified with the South, partly because of the subject matter of his songs, and partly because of the Southern dialect in which his lyrics were written and published.
Truth be told, only a small number of Foster's compositions, like Camptown Races were suited to or performed by black-face minstrel shows. By far, most of his songs were written within the traditions of the British-American genteel airs that had risen in the 1800s out of the needs and tastes of a growing middle class. Stephen Foster was a true northerner, born on the 4th of July 1826, near Pittsburgh, PA. The most southerly city he lived in was Cincinnati, and only once did he ever venture into the deep South - when Foster and his wife travelled by steamboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

Source: Liner notes by H. Wiley Hitchcock, “Songs by Stephen Foster,” Nonesuch Records, H-71268.
Recordings on File by: Dan & Louise Brock, Pete Seeger.

Careless Love

Careless Love is one of the earliest, if it is not actually the first, blues and is one of the greatest American melodies. Folklorists think that it originated among white singers and was adopted later by Southern African Americans. Careless Love, like many songs from the South, has changed hands across race lines so many times that it has invariably picked up musical and lyrical characteristics from both cultures. Careless Love, like Easy Rider and Make Me a Pallet on the Floor, all share an early blues heritage as well as a common musical structure. Each verse is sixteen measures in length with the first line repeated 3 times and the punch" or rhyming line as the fourth and final line of the stanza.

Source: Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
Recordings on File by: Joan Baez, Big Bill Broonzy, Carl Jackson, Brownie McGhee, Joe Turner.

Cat Came Back

Some say that the minstrel show circuit of the late 1800s was the first pop-song movement in American history. Henry S. Miller, a Chicagoan was a very popular composer during this time, specializing in comical and novelty songs. Just like the cat in the song, The Cat Came Back endures to this day because of and despite many changes and adaptations.
Some suggest that the great Merle Travis used The Cat Came Back as a musical model for his classic Sixteen Tons.

Source: The Collected Reprints from Sing Out! Volumes 1964-73, Sing Out Publications.
Recordings on File by: Cisco Houston, Trout Fishing in America.

Cindy

Wherever the minstrel show and its music penetrated in America, it carried along the five- string banjo, which might be said to be America's only original folk instrument. After the minstrel shows died out and popular culture had grown tired of the banjo, it found its final home in the lonesome hollers of the Southern Mountains. Mountain fiddlers worked at the contraption until they had produced a land of music that was neither Afro-American nor minstrel style, nor a transcription of their old-time tunes, but a peculiar and wonderful mixture of them all.
Darlin' Corey, John Hardy, Black-Eyed Susie, and Cindy are examples of an American music that strongly bears the influence of the mountain five-string banjo style. And simple songs such as these have literally traveled around the world since their humble beginnings, helping to define the sound and give character to the American song bag.
The lyrics to Cindy are little more than a hundred-year old improvised liar’s contest about the fictional girl for whom this song is titled. They tell a story of how much she was in love with this singer or that. The tune is a dance number of common stock for fiddle or banjo and fit for a square dance or a reel.

Source: Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
Recordings on File by: Susan Cahill & Fred Cockerham, Michael Cooney, Jim Craig, Hobart Smith.

City of New Orleans

Steve Goodman is remembered as one of Chicago's favorite sons, and is one of the most celebrated musicians the Old Town School of Folk Music can claim as an alumnus.
     Goodman wrote dozens of song and recorded many acclaimed albums in a career that was sadly cut short by leukemia. Those who were lucky enough to hear him acknowledge that his enthusiasm, boundless energy, spirit and sparkling live performances are the stuff out of which legends are made.
     There's a story that still gets told around Chicago how Steve and his buddy John Prine were working at a Chicago night club. Arlo Guthrie (son of Woody Guthrie) had just gotten finished with his show at another place, and stopped in to relax and listen to some music and try not to get noticed too much. Well, he did get noticed, and Goodman and his pals wanted Arlo to hear a new train song he had just written. The story goes on to say that Arlo was quite annoyed with the imposition and agreed to listen to Goodman play his song if he and his friends would then go away and leave him to his privacy. As things turned out, Arlo loved the song and wound up recording it later that year and The City of New Orleans became a gold record.
     With the success of Steve Goodman and The City of New Orleans in the early 1970s, the tune was then included in the Old Town School of Folk Music's songbook and has remained popular with students, teachers, and supporters of the School ever since.

Recordings on File by: Judy Collins, Steve Goodman, Arlo Guthrie.

Corrina, Corrina

Corrina, Corrina has always been a dance number and is the same song as versions of Roberta and Alberta. Whatever name this tune goes by, it has been a popular song among Anglo and African-American musicians for as long as anyone can remember. It's part blues and part hillbilly.
Notable among the countless recordings of it are cuts by Mississippi John Hurt, Big Joe Turner, and British rocker Eric Clapton, but the song's popularity was undoubtedly sustained when a Texas swing fiddler by the name of Bob Wills and his band, the Texas Playboys, recorded it in the late 1930s. The record was a huge hit and became one of their signature pieces.

Source: The Folk Songs of North America, by Alan Lomax, Doubleday.
Recordings on File by: Eric Clapton (Alberta), Michael Cooney (Weeping Willow), Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, Joe Turner, Doc Watson, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.

Crawdad Song

Crawdad is a variant of an older piece named Sweet Thing, which was born in the levee camps and jook joints of the African-American South, and is the kind of tune designed to accompany a sort of dance called a 'play party'
In the first hundred years or so of our nation's history, many communities permitted play parties as a function of social interaction. Square dancing was frowned upon but permitted, and 'round dancing' where couples danced face to face with arms around each other was something no respectable country girl would do.
Play party melodies are characteristically simple and lilting, and the words are often improvised responses to the experiences of working, courting, and living. Many, many songs in North American folk music have their roots in the play party tradition. When you hear a group of children singing and chanting jump rope rhymes in the school yard, you are listening to an example of a modern play party.

Source: Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
Recordings on File by: Jim Kweskin & the Kids, Win Stracke, Doc Watson, Dick Weisman & Dan Fox.

Cripple Creek

When the first settlers came from England to the New World, the violin was still a folk instrument, popular at country dances in the shires, but not yet accepted in polite society. For frontier America, however, the fiddle was not just another musical instrument, it was music itself. Played butt against the chest instead of under the chin, sounding the old English and Irish reels and the wild bagpipe melodies of the Scottish highlands, its wailing, throbbing voice rang through the wilderness like the crow of the rooster, calling the folks to their hoedowns, husking bees, log rollings, corn shuckings, and weddings.
Cripple Creek is another of many North American songs whose roots are in the play party and dance tradition. Nowadays it is also popular as a banjo piece.

Source: Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
Recordings on File by: Michael Cooney, Flatt & Scruggs, David Johnson, Pete Seeger.

A Final Note…