Word: songbag
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Dates: during 1927-1927
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...Songbag...
...town and "hear the old nigger lady who moans 'em by the hour." Mr. Sandburg has always gone, always listened. He has kept a notebook, jotted down the words and the tunes in strange hieroglyphics comprehensible only to himself. Now he presents them as The American Songbag.* There are some 280, and, like the family piecebag, they are of all colors and patterns. There are songs of sailors, of miners, of lumberjacks, of loggers, of hobos, of prisoners and pick & shovel men, of washerwomen, bandits and railroad gangs. They tell stories, of pioneer memories, of the Mexican border...
when the Goulds and the Vanderbilts were big names in railroading, of circus barkers, of deserted damsels, and of Outlaw Jesse James. The poems are all real, all primitive, good reading. But the Songbag is a music book, to be kept on the piano. There are harmonies more tempting than any of the verses. They fairly cry to be sung and the arrangements come from such composers as Leo Sowerby, Henry Joslyn, Alfred G. Wathall, Edward Collins, Ruth Porter Crawford, Lillian Rosedale Goodman. Some of them, to be sure, are a bit elaborate for the earthy tunes that inspired them...
...AMERICAN SONGBAG-Carl Sandburg- Harcourt Brace...