You Fight On
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-08-21

Day 158 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

By my reckoning, we pass the halfway mark through Carl Sandburg's American Songbag. Another 157 songs to go. Cowboy songs, Mexican border songs, southern mountain songs, what Sandburg calls "Darn Fool Ditties", railroad, lumberjack, and sailor songs, as well as bandit biographies, war songs, and spirituals.

Sandburg writes: Brave counsel and spacious melody for a pilgrim's progress. ... A North Carolina woman at Purdue University heard this for years as a girl from a black woman cook in her home. "Often when I was in the kitchen she would say to me, 'Come on, Miss Mary, get on de tune wagon, you ain't on de tune wagon.'"

(from the Traditional Ballad Index) "This appears to me to be based -- very loosely -- on Matt. 18:15: "If a brother sins [against you], bring it to his attention when the two of you are alone." Note: the words "against you" are omitted by the two oldest manuscripts." RBW

Personally, I think the song combines the sentiment of Matthew 18:15 and of 2 Corinthians 10:4. Pray for peace, be prepared to fight evil.

MORE ON THE AMERICAN SONGBAG WHILE AT THE HALFWAY MARK

In 1920 Carl Sandburg  (poet, journalist, and lecturer) was becoming a literary celebrity. His guitar and repertoire of songs provided a popular finale to his lecture-recitals. After each lecture, someone came up to offer new songs, or variants on those he had just sung. Sandburg would transcribe them in his own makeshift notation system, and jot down the lyrics in his pocket notebook. 

Sandburg said, "This whole thing is only in its beginning, America knowing its songs.” 

For Sandburg, …he was discovering the American tongue in songs as well as speech,…Sandburg explored the American character and promise. He sang its history and diversity in the ever-growing repertoire of folk music.

Everywhere he lectured people flocked to him with songs. Anonymous Americans sent him songs, as did musicologists, folklorists, and friends. Robert Frost, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, to name a few.

As Sandburg sang and lectured his way around the United States and back again, his musical "ragbag" filled to overflowing with country songs, prairie songs, war songs, jail songs, songs of love and cities and death and nonsense. He is the last of the troubadours, the last of the nomad artists who hunted out the songs people made up, and then sang them back to the people like a revelation .... Both his singing and his search for songs are part of his belief in the essential merit of the common man. 

His comment, to the publisher when the book was completed, ”I’m glad you think it looks something like a songbook as it now stands. In the jib, the boom and the peep, it ain't such a bad songbook; there have been many worse." 

The American Songbag was certainly a major contribution to American Music. Contemporary recording artist Dan Zanes says, “The thing I got a sense of right away was in those twenty-four chapters, Sandburg was really trying to cast a wide net. I’m somewhat familiar with a lot of the books that came out prior to the American Songbag but I’ve never seen anything that tries to be inclusive as the Songbag was in 1927.”

And Pete Seeger once said, “You might say it was a people’s education about the United States of America. What they taught in school was rather formal. [You learned the facts,] but you didn’t get the stories behind all this. And these songs gave you the stories.

(info from Penelope Niven's biography of Sandburg, as well as from the documentary "The Day Carl Sandburg Died.")