THE AMERICAN SONGBAG — Nicholas Phan

The below is my program note for the final performance of CAIC’s 2022 Collaborative Works Festival, which took place at Epiphany Center for the Arts on September 11, 2022 and will be broadcast from October 5-10, 2022.

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“The American Songbag is a ragbag of strips, stripes, and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth. The melodies and verses presented here are from diverse regions, from varied human characters and communities, and each is sung differently in different places.” - Carl Sandburg

So begins Carl Sandburg’s introduction to his groundbreaking collection of American folk song, The American Songbag. The anthology would redefine American notions of folk music, which until then had largely been thought of as the popular songs of composer Stephen Foster. Similar to the folk song collecting being done by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály in Hungary earlier in the 20th century, Sandburg’s collection challenged notions of national identity, eschewing the parlor songs of middle- and upper-class white Americans. Instead, he laid out a diverse and inclusive vision of America, publishing the songs of the white poor and working classes, as well as pointedly including those of Mexican Americans (like La Cucaracha) and the blues, work songs, and spirituals of Black Americans.

“A wide human procession marches through these pages. The rich and the poor; robbers, murderers, hangmen; fathers and wild boys; mothers with soft words for their babies; workmen on railroads, steamboats, ships; wanderers and lovers of homes, tell what life has done to them.”

– Carl Sandburg, Introduction to The American Songbag

The second of seven children of Swedish immigrants, Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1878. He spent his younger years largely as a vagabond, working odd jobs as he wandered the country. With the onset of the Spanish American War in 1898, Sandburg enlisted in the US Army – a turning point in his life. Upon his return from service, he was offered a year of free tuition at Lombard College. While there, three formative things happened to him: he was introduced to socialism, he decided to become a writer, and, he discovered his passion and flair for performing.

Leaving the college without finishing his degree, Sandburg would move to Wisconsin, where he campaigned for the Socialist Party of America’s candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, before finally settling in Chicago in 1912, finding work as a journalist for a variety of leftist newspapers. During these years as a reporter, Sandburg began writing poetry, using his poems a sort of “daily journal” as he documented the events of the city. In 1914, he was published for the first time in Poetry magazine.

During these years, to supplement his meager income as a journalist, Sandburg also began touring as a performer, reading poetry and incorporating folk songs into his shows and accompanying himself on guitar. A dynamic stage presence, he quickly gained notoriety, and this aspect of his work began to take a sharper focus. Describing his decision to combine music and poetry in his recitals, he wrote to a friend: “This whole thing is in its beginnings, America knowing its songs…It’s been amazing to me to see how audiences rise to ‘em.” Initially collecting the songs to use in performance, he soon set down to assemble them for the anthology. As he prepared the collection for publication, he enlisted his friends from the Chicago classical music community to create arrangements for them – including his close friend Ruth Crawford Seeger, whom he regarded as a member of the Sandburg family after they became connected when she was engaged to teach his three daughters piano lessons.

Tonight’s program largely consists of arrangements of the songs collected in Sandburg’s Songbag. One of these arrangements is one of the four contributions Ruth Crawford Seeger made to the American Songbag when it was first published in 1927. Two are by living composers Steven Mark Kohn and Alan Smith. Others are by George Walker (the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music), Margaret Bonds, and Ernst Bacon, who was greatly influenced by his close friend Sandburg as he developed his vision for what American music should sound like.

Alongside these arrangements are musical settings of Sandburg’s poetry by three composers: Howard Swanson, one of the 20th century’s leading African American composers; Ernst Bacon; and a composer who has taken great inspiration from Sandburg’s biographical narrative growing up in small-town Illinois and settling in the big city of Chicago, Eric Malmquist.