New England Singing Tradition

Lawrence Millman, in a review of several recent albums devoted to elderly traditional Anglo-American singers (JAF 96:114-116), makes seriously misleading statements about the Northeast heritage that cannot pass without comment. Millman uses Sara Cleveland (Philo 1020) as his springboard. I have no particular quarrel with his evaluation of the album per se (though he totally sidesteps the impact that folk music scholars like Kenneth Goldstein, plus folk concert adulation, have had upon her repertory and style), but I do wish to address his unfounded claims concerning Northeast folksong tradition. Millman asserts, "The Northeast is not exactly a haven for traditional vocalists. Perhaps this is a result of the New Englander's much-vaunted separateness, his lonely pursuit of his own granitic fate." In response to these pronouncements, one need only be reminded of the extensive folksong collections by Barry, Harkness and Flanders, Porter, Ives, and Cazden (among others). Various albums since the 1950s featuring New York State singers other than Cleveland-John Galusha, Grant Rogers, Lawrence Older, Ted Ashlaw-add to the list. Surely this evidence makes a mockery of the old chestnut about inexpressive Northeast folk, particularly as regards traditional song. A more accurate observation does warrant mention: namely, that New England voices haven't been captured on record to the same degree as Southern counterparts. Equally unsettling is Millman's claim that New England singers, in contrast to Southerners, "seem to relish death and gore for purity's sake, irrespective of the social order. Murder and disaster are the bread-and-butter of Northeastern balladry." The remarks here sweep aside decades of observation about American ballad subject matter as found throughout the country, and certainly present a distorted picture of the repertory as actually found in the South. Intentionally or not, Millman sets up a gross stereotype that is equivalent to saying that Southerners collectively are hung up in songs renouncing this life for deliverance in the next. His additional point that, "Few of the older New England singers have concerned themselves with [protest] in any overt way" is more defensible, at least as worded, but then conditions in the lumberwoods weren't exactly on the order of the coal mining industry elsewhere (mill and canal work in the Northeast are another matter). It is always nice to find record reviews that give space to the New England tradition, such as we have it on vinyl. But let that exposure be an accurate one.