Life Flows on in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History

Abstract

Life Flows on in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History. By Robert V. Wells. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 245, preface, notes, select bibliography and discography, index. $25.00 paper.)The teacher of American history looking for a collateral reading book to assign students will not find it in Life Flows on in Endless Song. Robert Wells is clear about his purpose: "My intent here is ... to explain how a social historian/folk singer has come to understand the songs and what they tell about American history" (xi). His engaging book succeeds admirably in the first of these goals. He is less successful in explaining "what they tell about American history."To begin with, as Wells is fully aware, "few folk songs had much to say about national politics" (Lomax in Wells, 4). "The bulk of the historical record used to reconstruct our past was produced by wealthy and powerful people" (6). For fhese and other reasons, "in any work in which the primary focus is on the songs, a topical organization should prevail" (199). So far, so good. And it would be difficult to find fault with Wells's choice of topics: courtship and family life, religion and war, work, transportation, migration, and crime. The devil, as drey say, is in the details.Wells writes that, "Between fhe eighteenth and twentiefh centuries, Americans experienced profound revolutions in the most intimate aspects of their lives and the values they attached to their actions. Folk songs comment on many of these changes" (11). Thus Wells announces a theme of "Careless Love," the well-tided chapter on courtship and family life. Two pages later he writes, "Over fhe course of several centuries, relationships and power within families changed noticeably. Folksongs often hint at these changes and occasionally comment directly on them" (13). Surely, then, we have a right to expect here, if nowhere else, a chronological account of the changes and how they are reflected in folksong. We don't get it. We do get interesting and insightful discussions of individual songs, but we do not get any attempt to fit them into the pattern to which Wells has alluded.While it might seem strange to lump religion and war into a single chapter, Wells uses "The Batde Hymn of the Republic" as mortar to hold them together. He is fairly successful in showing how folksongs reflect the First and Second Great Awakenings and then how folksongs reflect one war after another (though certainly not all of America's wars) . The only difficulty here is the inclusion of "The Ballad of Schenectady," about a colonial war in 1690. Wells admits that it is "Litde remembered and probably seldom sung" (54), and it does not seem to fit the four criteria for folksongs that Wells adumbrates on page 7. (The four criteria are (1) oral transmission, (2) what G. Malcolm Laws called an "unaffected style," (3) non-commercial performance, and (4) variant versions. …