PREFACE
to
Blues lyric poetry: an anthology
by
Michael Taft
(
This
computer-generated anthology serves two main purposes. First, it is a companion piece to Blues Lyric Poetry: A
Concordance (Taft, Blues), and
thus gives the user of that concordance the complete poetic context for every
word, phrase, or line in which he is interested. Second, this anthology makes
available to the reader a large and varied selection of blues lyrics which have
either never appeared in print before, or which are scattered among smaller
anthologies and blues studies. All of the texts transcribed here are from the 1920 to
1942 period - the race record era - and comprise over two thousand commercially
recorded songs sung by over three hundred and fifty singers.
Other than the fact that all these
singers were black and sang the blues, there are few other common factors in
their make-up: their backgrounds, repertoires, styles, and reasons for
recording vary greatly. Thus, this anthology includes both country and urban,
both male and female, both "downhome" (to use Titon's term) and
vaudeville singers. Among those represented here are singers who recorded only
one or two songs and those who recorded over a hundred; those who sang
accompanied only by their own guitar or piano, and those who were a part of a
string band, jug band, or jazz band. As a whole, this anthology is an
exploration of the blues lyric and, more specifically, the blues couplet, which
defines this lyric form.
The
blues, as a form of folk and popular song, demands a clear definition, since
the word "blues" itself has generally been used to cover a wide
range of both musical and lyric forms. Since this work concentrates upon the
lyrics rather than the music of the song form, my inclusion or exclusion of
texts in this anthology was based on lyric poetic criteria. Indeed there are both etic and emic reasons for defining the
blues primarily as
poetry
and only secondarily as music. Charles Keil (51) and John Szwed (222) have
both seen the blues as primarily a poetic form, and ex-blues singer Rubin
Lacy agrees: "the blues is not sung for the tune. It's sung for the words
mostly. A real blues singer sings a blues for the words" (Evans 13).
Thus, the definition often given of the blues as an eight-, twelve-, or sixteen-bar
form of song is not relevant to this study. In fact, this criterion has been
overused and overstated in the discussion of the blues form, since the blues
rarely conforms to a tight metric structure. Early in the history of blues
scholarship, Odum and Johnson discovered this disjoint relationship between
blues lyrics and blues music (291), and more recently, Jean Wagner has examined
the same phenomenon: "a more or less indefinite number of unaccentuated
syllables can be put between the stresses, which makes a blues verse quite
lengthy, so that it can be represented typographically in two lines of equal
or unequal length" (from Les poètes
nègres des Etats-Unis, translated in Jahn 167).
To
define the structure of the blues stanza is to define the blues itself. As
Newman I. White wrote, "the stanza, and not the song, is the only true
unit" in the blues ("White Man" 207), and most scholars since
his time have tended to agree with this general premise (for example, see
Charters 4, Ferris 34, and Hyman 306). But what
is the nature of the blues stanza? Again, since the beginnings of blues
scholarship, there has been general agreement that the structure of the stanza
is a couplet with the first line repeated twice; but this definition is
somewhat off the mark. Niles (2) and White (American
387-88) were among the first to recognize that the repetiton of lines is
variable in the blues, although the commonest stanzaic form is the one
described above. This three-line form is so common, in fact, that even if it is
not the best criterion for definition, it is very much the trademark of the
blues. Thus, blues singer Leonard Caston's definition is no different from the
definitions of most blues scholars:
In the
blues they'd be making these recordings, you're playing the twelve-bar blues,
you have to do these things in order for maybe whomsoever listen to this
particular thing wouldn't hear it the first thing you said. So you would repeat
it so you make sure you get the first thing. And so they would add the rhyming thing at the
end. So this would make you do your first line two times and your rhyme would
come after. Well this got to be the thing where people listening would expect
that; so they still do. So in order to get things
across they would do it. (Titon, ed. 24)
Virtually
all scholars and singers agree that the lines in the blues stanza should rhyme,
although the exact nature of the blues rhyme is more complex than it first
appears (see Taft, "Willie" for an extended discussion of this
subject). But there is another major stanzaic criterion which, if more subtle,
is nevertheless as important as rhyme in defining the blues: the caesura which
separates each line into two half-lines. Odum
and Johnson were perhaps the first to describe this caesura (267) and three
years later, Milton Metfessel actually timed the duration of these half-line
breaks in hun�dredths of a second:
Take me back daddy [.62] try me one mo'
time [.47]
Ef I doan do to suit you [.29] I'll break my
back-bone tryin' (109-10)
More recently Jeff Todd Titon has
explored the nature of the caesura from a musi�cological point of view (Titon
142-43).
The most general definition of the
blues stanza, then, is that it is a rhymed couplet in which each line is
divided by a caesura. Perhaps one final characteristic is that in most cases there is no
enjambment from one line to the next in the stanza; that is, each line is
end-stopped. Oster compared the blues stanza to
the heroic couplet (70), but of course the blues couplet lacks the strong
metrical demand of the heroic couplet. In terms of theme or content of the
stanza, perhaps the only generalization to be made is that the blues couplet is
a secular rather than a sacred form of poetry and that it describes everyday life.
The predominant theme is love and indeed the blues can be described as love
poetry or erotic poetry, although some songs (and certainly many individual
couplets) are concerned with drink, poverty, war, dancing, eating, horse
racing, and countless other common subjects.
What
are some of the variations upon this basic blues couplet? The most common type of variation is in the number of
repetitions of either the first, the last, or both lines in the couplet. If we represent the basic
blues couplet as AA we can readily see the kinds of repetitions which occur in
the blues. As already mentioned, the most
common form of repetition is 2AA:
I'm flying to South Carolina : I got to get
there this time
I'm flying to South Carolina : I got to get
there this time��������������������
Women in
(Blind Lemon
However,
the simple, unembellished AA couplet is also quite frequent:
Good Lord
good Lord : send me an angel down
Can't spare
you no angel : will spare you a teasing brown
(Blind Willie McTell, Ticket
Agent Blues)
It is the first line of the couplet
which is most often repeated, but not necessarily just twice. Note the
following 3AA form:
If you want
a good woman : get one long and tall
If you want
a good woman : get one long and tall
If you want
a good woman : get one long and tall
When she go to loving : she make a panther squall
(Wiley Barner, If You
Want a Good Woman � Get One Long and Tall)��������������������������
But
the second line of the couplet is also capable of being repeated, as in this
A2A example:
I tell you
girls : and I'm going to tell you now
If you don't want me : please don't dog me
around
If you don't want me: please don't dog me
around
(Robert
Wilkins, Alabama Blues)
A
singer might opt for a 2A2A stanza, but more commonly, he chose to repeat the
entire couplet twice in a 2(AA) structure:
Well I solemnly swear : Lord I raise my right
hand�
That I'm
going to get me a woman : you get you another man
I solemnly
swear : Lord I raise my right hand
That I'm going to get me a woman babe : you
get you another man
(Son House, My Black Mama � Part
2)
Theoretically
any combination of repetitions is possible - 4AA, 2A3A, 3(AA), 2(2AA), etc.-
but the above forms account for nearly all the variations in repetition found
in this corpus of the blues.
However,
a large number of blues songs employ a type of variation which is not based on
repetition; rather these couplets are embellished with a refrain. The refrain
may be a short tag-line or a multi-line verse,
but it does not have to conform to the blues couplet structure in any way. Note
the following examples:
You say you
done quit me : now what should I do
Can't make up my mind : to love no one but you
(refrain):
I don't
like that
No I don't
I don't
like that
No I don't
You know it
kill me dead
I don't
like that
(Barefoot Bill, I
Don�t Like That)
Look here woman : making me mad
Done bringing me something : somebody done had
(refrain):
Carry it right back home
I don't want it no more
(Ed Bell, Carry It Right Back
Home)
Both examples might be represented
as AAr couplets, but a more complex stanzaic form combines both repetition and
a refrain. Note the following 2AAr couplet:
I went down
in the alley : trying to sell my coke today
I went down in the alley : trying to sell my
coke today
And a woman run out and hollered : scared my
mule away
(refrain):
She wanted to boodlie-bum-bum
She hollered
boodlie-bum-bum
Oh boodlie-bum
boodlie-bum boodlie-bum-bum
(Blind
Bogus Ben Covington, Boodle-De-Bum-Bum)
To add further complexity to blues
poetry, the refrain itself might also take the stanzaic form of the blues
couplet. Thus,
the following two examples represent
Early one morning : just about half past three
You done
something : that's really worrying me
(refrain):
Come on
baby : take a little walk with me
Back to the same old place : where we long to
be
(Robert Lockwood, Take a Little
Walk with Me)
I got a gal
: she got a Rolls Royce
She didn't get it all : by using her voice
(refrain):
I'm wild
about my tuni : only thing I crave
I'm wild about my tuni : only thing I crave
Well sweet patuni : going to carry me to my
grave
(Willie Baker, Sweet Patunia
Blues)
Just as the refrain might manifest
itself in a number of different forms which bear little or no resemblance to
the structure of the blues couplet, the couplet itself may become a refrain,
chorus, or blues-like interjection in a basically non-blues song. This
phenomenon most often occurs in the songs of female vaudeville singers which, though
blues-like in many ways, do not conform to the poetic criteria of the blues. In the following song by
Trixie Smith the first stanza exhibits a non-blues ABAB structure; the second
stanza is ABBA; and the third stanza, although AA in structure, has no caesuras
in its lines. Only the last two stanzas are blues couplets:
Now some folks long to have a-plenty money
Some will
want their wine and song
But all I
want is my sweet loving honey
I cry about
him all night long
Once I had a dear sweet daddy but I didn't
treat him right
So he left town
With Mandy Brown
That is why I'm blue tonight
So I'm leaving here today
When I find
him he will say
Please come back and love me like you used to
do : I think about you every day
You reap just what you sow in the sweet bye
and bye : and be sorry that you went away
Oh baby I'm crazy : almost dead
I wish I had you here : to hold my aching head
(Trixie Smith, Love Me Like You
Used To)
In
this song there is a definite instrumental and vocal break as Smith shifts into
a blues texture. The last line of the third
stanza, "When I find him he will say," acts as an introduction to the
blues stanzas which follow. Titon has pointed out that such semi�-blues were typical
Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville songs in which the composers consciously embedded the
blues form within a larger framework and often marked the blues section of the
song "tempo di blues" on the published sheet music (Titon xvi).
In
addition to repetitions, refrains, and "embedding," there were some
stylistic devices which singers employed to vary the structure of the
individual line or to make one repetition of the line different from the next. Perhaps the most common device of this sort is what might be
termed "staggering," in which the singer would repeat parts of a line
or a half-line in an incremental fashion. Note the following 3AA couplet:
When you hear me walking : turn your lamp
down, turn your lamp down, lamp down low
When you hear me walking : turn your lamp down
low
When you
hear me walking : turn your lamp down low
Then turn
it so : your man'll never know
(Bobby Grant, Nappy Head Blues)
On
rare occasions, the singer might sing only a partial blues stanza; that is,
there would be no rhyming line to complete the couplet. These partial stanzas
could take any number of forms, depending upon the repetitions and refrains
which the singer used: A, 2A, 3A, Ar, 2Ar:AA, and so on. In theory, these
partial stanzas should not be considered blues couplets at all, but they generally
occur within the context of a song where the other stanzas conform to the
texture of blues poetry. Rather than being �embedded" non-blues stanzas in
a blues song, these stanzas seem to be "implied couplets" in which
the singer and listener agree to break the rules in a song. Perhaps indicative
of the fact that these half-couplets are a part of the blues poetic form is
that they occur, not in the vaudeville compositions, but �rather in the more conservative, downhome
blues.
The
combinations possible within the confines of the simple stanza are many. Add to
this the possible combinations of stanzaic types within the same song and the
varieties inherent to the texture of the blues become truly astounding.
However, the blues singers were rather conservative; many possible combinations
never appear in the blues. This conservative tendency is especially clear when
one considers that perhaps 80 percent of all blues songs follow the classic 2AA
pattern.
Both this anthology and the
concordance grew out of a detailed study of the structural and formulaic
properties of the half-line and line in the blues couplet (Taft,
"Lyrics"). As a reflection of this type of analysis, I have stripped down the transcriptions
of these blues texts to their basic couplets.Thus, all repetitions, all
refrains which do not conform to the blues couplet structure, and all non-blues
stanzas in the vaudeville songs, as well as any spoken interjections or other
extrastanzaic elements in the songs have been left out of these transcriptions.
Where a refrain does conform to blues couplet structure, I have transcribed it,
but only once, no matter how many times that refrain occurs in the song. I transcribed staggered lines only if there was no
unstaggered repetition of that line in the stanza.
Admittedly
such transcriptions are not as useful as full verbatim texts, but the choice of
stripped-down songs was necessary for the type of computerized study from which
these works grew. Thus, as stated at the beginning of the preface, this
anthology is more a study of the blues couplet than the blues song. If there is
a rationale beyond expediency for this choice of transcription, it is that the
blues is an extremely fluid song form: indeed, as pointed out by several recent
scholars, the blues is a prime example of formulaic poetry in which neither
lines nor half-lines nor stanzas are set, invariable structures (see Barnie,
both articles, Taft, "Lyrics," and Titon 178-93). In effect, there is
one great blues song from which all the actual blues texts arose. Thus, the floating couplet is the essence of blues poetry
and all else is embellishment upon this form.
Of
course these texts are stripped down in other ways. I have not attempted
musical transcriptions of the tunes, even though the entire song form is an
amalgamation of music and poetry. Nor have I attempted to account for stress
patterns, intensity of speech, voice quality (such as falsetto), elision,
duration, or emphasis in the singing. Indeed no
transcription gives a complete version of a text; there must always be
compromises based on expediency, clarity, and the intended purpose of the
transcrip�tion. For the complete version of a text, the reader must listen to the
recording; and even then the performance is incomplete, since the actions of
the singer in the recording studio were not recorded along with his music and
words. However, for every text in this
anthology there is relatively easy access to the recording, since all the songs
transcribed are available on one or more reissue, long-playing albums (see the
Discography). Ideally,
the reader can listen to the songs with this anthology in hand and make notes
on the transcriptions in order to fill in the gaps inherent in these
stripped-down versions.
The method of transcription was
the same for all texts in this book. The album was first recorded onto tape
and then the tape was played on a transcribing machine, so that difficult
passages could be replayed any number of times, speeded up or slowed down,
in order to acquire the most accurate transcriptions possible. I used other
people's transcriptions only after attempting my own version of a song and
then only to verify or clear up those passages which were either questionable
or impossible to decipher. There were, of course, many occasions when I could
not be sure of what the singer was singing or when I had no idea whatsoever.
Worn and scratchy recordings, unfamiliar dialects, dated speech, the slurring
of sung words, the interference of the music, and my own idiosyncratic conceptions
of the blues lyric all contributed to the inaccuracies in this anthology.
As well, since I did these transcriptions over a six-year period (1971-1977)
in a fairly random fashion as I acquired more and more albums, my ability
to understand the words became increasingly sophisticated as time went on.
Unfortunately, this means that my earlier transcriptions are probably less
accurate than my later ones.
Where I have been unable to
decipher a passage, I have placed three question marks (???), as in the
following example:
And nobody shake it : like papa ??? can
(Mae Glover, Shake It Daddy)
This symbol in no way indicates the
length of the untranscribable passage, but on occasion I have modified the
symbol if I think that I hear a word-ending or syllable:
I'm down in the bottom : ???ing for Johnny Rye
(Huddie Ledbetter, Honey, I�m All
Out and Down)
In
total, there are 469 undecipherable passages out of approximately 20,000 lines
of poetry. However, there are many more questionable passages; that is, some
passages which I have transcribed can only be called educated guesses at what
is being sung, either because of the peculiar wording of the passage or the
almost inaudible nature of that part of the song. These passages are enclosed in asterisks (*...*) in the
following manner:
Now my mama dead : so is my daddy too
*Should I caught the wire* : trying to get
along with you
(Sam Butler, Poor Boy Blues)
Although
I have not transcribed repetitions of lines, neither did I make composites of
the repetitions. Rather, I generally chose the
first singing of a repeated line, or if that line was staggered or in some
sense incomplete, I chose the second or third repetition of the line for my
transcription. In many cases, however, the repetitions of a line are not exact
duplicates of one another - yet another kind of variation in blues poetry. Often a singer would change or leave out exclamations or
evocative elements from one repeti�tion to the next (for example, oh or mama), change verb tenses, alter adverbial or adjectival
modifications, or replace a noun with a pronoun. In all such cases in which the
change in the repetitions seemed substantive - that is, where a part of the
sentence structure or vocabulary was radically changed - I have noted these
alterations in the transcription. For example,
note the following 2AA stanza:
Nice to meet strangers :just to come and spend
the day
Awful nice
to meet strangers : just to come and spend the day
But that
old-timey rider : can drive your blues away
(Clifford Gibson, Old Time Rider)
Here the word awful is inserted in the repetition of the first line. In the
transcription, this line appears as "[Awful] nice to meet strangers : just
to come and spend the day."
Where
a word or phrase is exchanged for another in a repetition, both appear within
brackets. Note the following example:
Tell me what time : do the trains come through
your town
I want to know what time : do the trains come
through your town
I want to laugh and talk : with a long-haired
teasing brown
(Blind Lemon
This
variation is transcribed as "[Tell me, I want to know] what time : do the
trains come through your town."
There
is another variation, however, which is not reflected in these transcriptions. Although
in most cases the caesura occurs at a convenient syntactic point in the line� -
between clauses, before a prepositional phrase, or after a nominal phrase - singers
did not always follow this rule. The
contingencies of the tune or simply artistic innovation sometimes place the
caesura in other parts of the line; indeed sometimes the singer dispensed with
the caesura altogether, usually in the second line of the couplet. In all cases, however, I
have placed the symbol for the caesura, the colon (:), at the traditional syntactic
point in the line, regardless of where the caesura actually falls. Again, this
feature of the transcription is a reflection of the structural analysis for
which this work was originally intended (Taft, "Lyrics"). In that analysis, I found that each syntactical coherent
half-line corresponded to a potential formula in the poetry. By standardizing the
placement of the caesura, these formulaic half-lines could be better visualized
in the anthology and more importantly, in the concordance. Thus, although in
the great majority of cases the colon corresponds to where the caesura actually
occurs, this symbol
should
be seen as a half-line marker or "ideal" caesura marker. There are a few cases in the corpus in which the singer
seemed to substitute a musical break for either the first or second half-line;
in these cases, the line either begins or ends with a colon.
Perhaps the most difficult decision
to make in transcribing texts concerns dialect and pronunciation. How far
should the transcriber go in trying to preserve the phonetic qualities of the
singer? In earlier scholarship, blues transcribers tried to be faithful to the
dialect (note Metfessel's attempt above), but these efforts usually resulted in
transcrip�tions which were difficult to read, highly inaccurate, and rather
insulting to the singer. What might be termed the "Uncle Remus"
school of transcribing is a poor substitute for accurate phonetic
transcription. But phonetic transcriptions are very difficult to read and, despite
their firm bases in linguistics, they are still open to different interpretations
by different readers.
For
these reasons I have made no attempt to transcribe the singers' pronunciations
of words. For example, regardless of whether the word going is pronounced goin',
goan, or gwine, I have always transcribed it as going. However, I have not changed or standard�ized dialect words,
morphemes, or syntactic features which are peculiar to a singer's speech. Thus,
I's, a-crying, you be done lost your
wife, drownded, and other nonstandard forms remain unaltered in these
transcriptions. But there is an area between
pronuncia�tion and other dialect features which called for arbitrary decisions.
For example,
what should be done with nonstandard contractions such as 'cause and �fore? In the
case of �cause, I standardized all
forms of the word to because, since
such a contraction was not always easily distinguishable from its full form in
the singing: the initial be- often
seemed an unvoiced phonetic element rather than an absent element. The
contraction �fore, however, seems to
have a separate and distinct usage from before
in the blues, especially when part of the phrase 'fore day creep; therefore, I have retained this contraction in the
transcriptions. Similarly , should gal
be treated as a phonetic variation on girl
or as a word in its own right? Because of its frequency and its rhyming
qualities, I have chosen to retain gal
as a separate word from girl. In all, I have tried to apply common sense to all such
transcription problems.
I
have avoided virtually all punctuation in these transcriptions, since periods
at the ends of lines, semi-colons, commas, and quotation marks seemed
unnecessary and often arbitrary. Although this
might lead to certain ambiguities in the texts, I prefer that the reader supply
his own sense of punctuation to these songs. This feature of the texts is also an
outgrowth of the specific analysis and use of these songs in my earlier work
(Taft, "Lyrics"); my aim was to produce clear, uncluttered texts.
The
blues songs in this anthology are arranged according to singer and, under each
singer, according to the chronological order of dates of recording and
sequences in the recording sessions. At the
beginning of every text is certain contextual information, as in the following
example:
Name
of singer� ����������������������������
Title������������������������������������������������� Long
Lonesome Day Blues
Place
and date�������������������������������
Record
numbers���������������������������� (81213-A)
OK-8511 Rt RL-315
Name of singer
Where
a song is attributed to a group in Godrich and
Title
The
title of the song as given in Godrich and
Place and date
Information
on place and date of recording also comes from Godrich and
Record numbers
The
line marked "record numbers" contains four pieces of information.
First, the matrix or master number of the recording is given
in parentheses. This number pinpoints the location and sequence in the daily
recording sessions of the record companies and is important in identifying
the relationship of the song to the entire output of the race record era.
In the above example, the master number is 81213. Within the parentheses following
this number is the take number or letter which indicates which version of
the song sung in the recording studio has been transcribed. Thus, this was the first
(and perhaps only) version of the song recorded by Alexander. Note however
that the first and second songs by Luke Jordan are different versions of the
same song sung by Luke Jordan and recorded in succession; they have the same
master number, 39819, but different take numbers, 1 and 2. All master and
take numbers are from Godrich and
The next information on this line
is the original catalogue number for the 78 rpm recording of the text. The
letters before the dash are an abbreviation for the record company or label
on which the song was recorded (see Abbreviations for Race Record Labels)
and the alphanumeric designation after the dash is the catalogue number. Customers
and store owners used this number for ordering records and the record companies
kept track of their inventories through this numbering system. Because nearly
all of the race records were two-sided discs, two songs share the same catalogue
number. See the first and second songs by Garfield Akers for an example of a shared
catalogue number on the Vocalion label, Vo-1442. Where a song was issued on two or more race record labels,
I have indicated only the first label and catalogue number listed in Godrich
and Dixon. In some cases, the recording was never issued but remained a test
pressing or a master in the possession of the record company. Where such songs have been
recorded on more recent long-playing albums, their catalogue number is replaced
by the word "unissued." See the first song by Luke Jordan for an
example. Again, Godrich and
The
final information on this line is the label and catalogue number of the long-�playing
album from which the song was transcribed. The
label either appears as a separate two or three-letter abbreviation followed by
an alphanumeric catalogue desig�nation, or, where the catalogue designation
contains no letters, as an abbreviation attached by a dash to the catalogue
number. Thus, in the example above, Rt is the label, Roots, and RL-315 is the
catalogue number for the album. Under the first song by Garfield Akers, however, the
more simple OJL-2 refers to the Origin Jazz Library label, record number 2. For the code to long-playing album abbreviations, see the
Discography and Abbreviations for Long-Playing Album Labels. Although some of
these songs have been reissued on more than one album, the designated album is
the one from which the song was transcribed.
The
song couplets themselves are transcribed in the order in which they were sung.
Where a blues couplet refrain appears throughout a song, its first appearance
is noted in the text (for example, coming after the first AA couplet) and
further repetitions have not been transcribed. However,
if each repetition of the refrain shows substantive changes, each of these
altered refrains has been transcribed.
In a few instances, a blues song is
sung by two singers, each singing alternating stanzas or even sometimes
alternating lines within the couplets. Following the general format of the
anthology, those lines and stanzas sung by one singer are listed under her
name, while those of the other singer are listed under his name. For example, note that Lonnie
Johnson, song # 10 and Victoria Spivey, song # 7 are different parts of the
same song.
The
final section of this anthology is a line-concordance to the titles of the
songs. Because of the fluid nature of blues titles, a simple alphabetical
listing of titles seemed a less-than-useful exercise. However, one of the
advantages of a computer�-generated anthology is that different text-reordering
programs can be applied to the corpus with relative ease. Thus, a more useful
index of titles is the one presented: a concordance which lists every word in
the titles in alphabetical order and lists every instance of every word by the
alphabetical and numerical order of the singer and song . For instance, if one wishes to know which songs have the
word jail in their title, one simply
looks up the word in the concordance-index. There one sees the head-word JAIL
followed by the number of occurrences of the word among the two thousand song
titles - in this case, eight. Reading down the list, one finds every instance
in the same order as one would find if one laboriously read through the entire
anthology: first Barefoot Bill, song # 3,, then Sam Collins, song # 1, then Joe
Evans, song # 1, and so on. In order to save
space, some insubstantive words such as a,
and, and the have not been
searched.
I
am in debt to a number of people and institutions. I thank Neil V. Rosenberg for lending me records from his
collection and for giving me his advice over the years. I also thank the Archives
of Traditional Music at Indiana University for allowing me access to their
record collection; and thanks as well to Frank Gillis, Director of the Archives
for his encouragement and help. The computing
centres at Memorial University of New�foundland and the University of
Saskatchewan have been most cooperative, and I thank them. My greatest debt is to
Dr. Michael J. Preston, Director of the Center for Computer Research in the
Humanities at the
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