In 1951, Elwyn L. Simons, then a 21-year-old student at Rice University in Houston, Texas, undertook to record his grandparents singing folksongs they had learned while growing up in Kansas in the 1880s and 1890s. Simons, himself an aspiring folksinger, recorded Frank and Myrtle Simons as they delivered the 28 traditional folk songs presented here.
There are many remarkable historical aspects to this collection. The quality of the reel-to-reel tapes, in the late 1940s and early 1950s still a technological marvel, to this day (2004) ably reproduce the sounds recorded. Simons' deft recording of the material, despite some level adjustments and clicks, is admirable as well. Most notable, however, is the fact of these recordings: the variations on folk songs here presented are but one expression, from a very specific time and place, of a larger tradition. They are of the people, expressing local interpretation while belonging to a larger canon, from a time when the only musical equipment most people had were their voices, and their only acccompaniment their friends and family. Frank and Myrtle sang these songs for their grandson when they were in their 70s, remembering long bygone days with a clarity suggesting the power of oral tradition. We call this website "Folk Songs in One Family" for two reasons. First, it mirrors the title of an essay Simons wrote on a selection of these songs the year after he recorded them, referenced here in the notes accompanying the songs. Additionally, the title hints at the potential richness of other collections held by other families -- this is but one piece of a larger puzzle, from a time, now gone, when recorded music was just emerging from its infancy. There is an innocence here in the face of technology: Frank and Myrtle did not learn these songs from recordings, which, perhaps because of this, lend the tunes an immediacy and freshness that still lives. One can only wonder how many other young people in the 1940s through the 1960s, when affordable portable recording technology became available, may have recorded their parents, grandparents and great grandparents singing songs learned in the days before recordable media and radio. Craig Breaden
March 2004 * A note on song content: Standards for what constitutes appropriate subject matter for songs shift and change with passing generations, and reflect societal mores and prejudices common to a particular period, even if they appear foreign to us today. Part of what makes these songs so valuable is the window they offer into a different time, and they should be interpreted with that understanding. Rather than attempt to gauge lyrical material material we would consider objectionable today, and create documentation for it on a song-by-song basis, we have simply placed an asterisk next to those songs where lyrics contain clear examples of words or content we would today consider objectionable. Top Home |