Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927)

A number of the songs on this website are mentioned by Carl Sandburg in his 1927 work The American Songbag, including:

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"Midnight Special," Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), p. 26.

This arrangement is from the song as rendered by midnight prowlers in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. It is impressionistic in style, delivering the substance of two lives in brief array. We see the man behind the bars looking out toward Roberta, who carries a document given her by some politician or precinct worker. The warden tells her, probably, the day is not Visitor's Day. As her man considers that he has twenty years yet to serve, he cries out that he would rather be under the wheels of a fast midnight train.

"Midnight Special," Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), p. 217.

A fast train, such as "The Midnight Special," means a getaway, outside air, freedom. They sing about it in the Houston, Texas, jailhouse, and elsewhere. The verses here can with little or no practice be adjusted to the tune of Midnight Special (1) in our folio of Dramas and Portraits.

Text & music: Midnight Special_Sandburg_26-27_&_217.pdf

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"The John B. Sails," Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), pp. 22-23.

John T. McCutcheon, cartoonist and kindly philosopher, and his wife Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon, mother and poet, learned to sing this on their Treasure Island in the West Indies. They tell of it, "Time and usage have given this song almost the dignity of a national anthem around Nassau. The weathered ribs of the historic craft lie imbedded in the sand at Governor's Harbor, whence an expedition, especially sent up for the purpose in 1920, extracted a knee of horseflesh and a ring-bolt. These relics are now preserved and built into the Watch Tower, designed by Mr. Howard Shaw and built on our southern coast a couple of points east by north of the star "Canopus."

Text & music: John B. Sails_Sandburg_22-23.pdf

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"Mister Frog Went A-Courting," Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), p. 143.

"In continuous use for four hundred years," L. W. Payne tells us in a forty-four page history of the song in Publication No. 5 of the Texas Folk Lore Society; he prints sixteen tunes and has many more. The following is a Kentucky and Virginia version, with text additions from Payne. "Ah-hah" can be "ulm-huhn," "eh-heh," "och-kungh" (like a bull frog) and, as you please.

1. Mister Frog went a-courting, he did ride, ah-hah, ah-hah!
Mister Frog went a-courting, he did ride, a sword and a pistol by his side, ah-hah, ah-hah!

2. He rode up to Miss Mousie's door, ah-hah, ah-hah!
He rode up to Miss Mousie's door, where he had often been before, ah-hah, ah-hah!

3. Now Uncle Rat when he came home says, "Who's been here since I been gone?"

4. "A very fine gentleman has been here who wishes me to be his dear."

5. Uncle Rat laughed and shook his side to think his niece would be a bride.

6. Uncle Rat on a horse he went to town to buy his niece a wedding gown.

7. Where shall the wedding supper be? Away down yonder in a hollow tree.

8. What shall the wedding supper be? Three green beans and a black-eyed pea.

9. Tell us, what was the bride dressed in? A cream gauze veil and a brass breastpin.

10. Tell us next what was the groom dressed in? Sky blue britches with silver stitches.

11. The first came in was a bumble bee, to play the fiddle upon his knee.

12. They all sat down and began to chat, when in walked the kitten and the cat.

13. Mrs. Cat she stepped to the supper and turned over the plate of butter.

14. Miss Mousie went a-tearing up the wall, her foot slipped and she got a fall.

15. They all went a-sailing across the lake, and they all were swallowed by a big black snake.

16. So here's the end of one, two, three, the cat, the frog and Miss Mousie.

17. There's bread and cheese upon the shelf, and if you want any just help yourself.

Text & music: Mister Frog Went A-Courting_Sandburg_143.pdf

Note: This article in Publication No. 5 of the Texas Folklore Society is available in xxx, Volume 2 (epub) as part of a printed volume of 400 pages. See: The Texas Folklore Society Collection in The Portal to Texas History. University of North Texas Libraries. https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/TFSP/  accessed February 24, 2020.

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"The Roving Gambler," Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), pp. 312-313.

A. The Roving Gambler. Girls with a wild streak, in the farther yesterdays, often lost their hearts to the man in dapper clothes, with a big gold watch-chain across his vest, and with plenty of money. ("I don't care where he gets it.") That the man was a stranger in town, that he was a gambler, that he introduced himself saying, "Come with me, girlie" were points in favor of his audacity, nerve. Such a couple, jack and queen, are briefly sketched in this song. The later chapters, whether she had to take in washing, whether he was converted at a religious revival and set himself up in a respectable business, we do not know. There is a swing and self-assurance to the tune and words, the swagger of the old-tirne minstrel troupe going down Main Street arid around the public square, led by the high-hat drum-major holding aloft a long baton with a golden ball gleaming on the end.

Note: The New Christy Minstrels did a cover of "The Roving Gambler."

B. In the mischievous, Yonder Comes My Pretty Little Girl, text B, is an authentic folk song found by R. W. Gordon on a southern tour.

C. From Delancy's Songbook No. 23, we give the text C, with repeated lines eliminated, of a piece called The Gamboling Man. This is evidently the popular song of English origin from which the southern and western minstrel troupes made their verses, Delaney tells us. We may note, in passing, that while gamblers may gambol and gambolers may gamble, the English version carries no deck of cards.

Text & music: Roving Gambler-Yonder Comes-Gamboling Man_Sandburg_312-313.pdf

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"Frankie and Albert," et al., Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), pp. 78-114.

A Frankie song is like a grand opera role; interpretations vary. The Leighton brothers run a gamut of emotions; John Lomax delivers a quizzically mournful monotone; Sig Spaeth vocalizes it like a gnome riding a gnu with gnats mellifluously. The maxim, "Life is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think," may go for viewpoints on this ballad. It is stark and fierce, it is serio-comic, or it is blah-blah as you like it.

If America has a classical gutter song, it is the one that tells of Frankie and her man. Josie, Sadie, Lillie, Annie, are a few of her aliases; she has many. Prof. II. M. Belden of the University of Missouri showed me sixteen Frankie songs, all having the same story though a few are located in the back country and in bayous instead of the big city. Then I met up with R. W. Gordon; he has 110 Frankie songs, and is still picking up new ones. R. Emmett Kennedy in his remarkably thorough and valuable book, "Mellows" has a song, "My Baby in a Guinea Blue Gown," which belongs in the Frankie discussion because its tune may have been the grandfather of the most widely known Frankie melodies.

The Frankie and Albert song, as partly given here, was common along the Mississippi river and among~railroad men of the middle west as early as 1888. It is a simple and mournful air, of the short and simple annals of the poor. The Frankie and Johnny song is of later development, with notes of violence and flashes of exasperation. The Frankie Blues came still later, and with its "blue" notes is, of course, "meaner" as a song. In many colleges are groups who sing Frankie songs in ragtime manner, with lackadaisical verses. As our American culture advances, it may be that classes will take up the Frankie songs as seriously as a play by Molicre or a Restoration comedy or the Provencal ballads of France. It may be said that the Frankie songs, at best, are an American parallel of certain European ballads of low life, that are rendered by important musical artists from the Continent for enthusiastic audiences in Carnegie Hall, New York, or Orchestra Hall, Chicago. Some day, perhaps, we may arrive at a better common understanding of our own art resources and how to use them. While the Frankie story deals with crime, violence, murder, adultery, its percentage in these respects is a good deal less than in the average grand opera.

Lastly, for those about to sing this piece, we should note that in several places, in San Francisco, Omaha, Fort Worth, Fort Smith, Fort Scott and Dubuque the verse about the man under the doctor's care crying, "Roll me over easy," or "Turn me over, doctor," has no tune; all present joining in a wide, wild, disconnected wailing. Also, we note, by alternating the names of Albert and Johnny, or Frankie, Josie, Sadie, any verse of any song goes for all.

The air of version II of Frankie and Johnny, carries all the verses of version I, except that the repeat, "so wrong" isn't used. While it may seem a discrepancy that Frankie, threatened with the electric chair, ends her days on the gallows, it should also be understood that several versions of the song picture her starting to join a county chain gang, wearing a ball and chain attached to one of her ankles.

Text & music:

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"Those Gambler's Blues," Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), p. 228-231.

This may be what polite society calls a gutter song. In a foreign language, in any lingo but that of the U. S. A., it would seem less vulgar, more bizarre. Its opening realism works on toward irony and fantasy, dropping in its final lines again to blunt realism. Texts and melody are from the song as given (A) by Henry McCarthy of the University of Alabama, and (B) by Jake Zeitlin and Jack Hagerty of Fort Worth and Los Angeles.

A: Henry McCarthy of the University of Alabama

1. It was down in old Joe's bar-room
On a corner by the square,
The drinks were served as usual,
And a goodly crowd was there.

2. On my left stood Joe McKenny,
His eyes bloodshot and red,
He gazed at the crowd around him
And these are the words he said:

3. "As I passed by the old infirmary,
I saw my sweetheart there,
All stretched out on a table,
So pale, so cold, so fair.

4. Sixteen coal-block horses,
All hitched to a rubber-tired hack,
Carried seven girls to the graveyard,
And only six of 'em comin' back.

5. O, when I die, just bury me
In a box-back coat and hat,
Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch chain
To let the Lord know I'm standin' pat.

6. Six crap shooters as pall bearers,
Let a chorus girl sing me a song
With a jazz band on my hearse
To raise hell as we go along."

7. And now you've heard my story,
I'll take another shot o' booze;
If anybody happens to ask you,
Then I've got those gambler's blues.

B: Jake Zeitlin and Jack Hagerty of Fort Worth and Los Angeles

1. Went down to St. Joe's infirmary,
To see my woman there;
She was layin' on the table,
So white, so cold, so fair.

2. Went up to see the doctor,
"She's very low," he said;
Went back to see my woman,
Good God! she's layin' there dead,

Spoken: She's dead!

3. Let her go, let her go, God bless her,
Wherever she may be!
There'll never be another like her,
There'll never be another for me.

4. I may be killed on the ocean,
I may be killed by a cannonball,
But let me tell you, buddy,
That a woman wan the cause of it all.

5. Seventeen girls to the graveyard,
Seventeen girls to sing her a song,
Seventeen girls to the graveyard
Only sixteen of 'em comin' back.

6. O sixteen coal-black horses,
To carry me when I'm gone.
O flowers on the coffin,
While the burial's carried on.

Text & music: Those Gambler's Blues_Sandburg_228-231.pdf

Note the similarity to a couple of verses found in “As I Walked Out In The Streets Of Laredo.”

As I Walked Out In The Streets Of Laredo, Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), p. 263.

A cowboy classic known in several tunes from the spaces patrolled by the Northwest Mounted to those where the Texas Rangers keep law and order, more or less. The air is old Irish and many of the lines are almost literally from old broadsides peddled in Dublin these years now gone.

3. "Let sixteen gamblers come handle my coffin,
Let sixteen cowboys come sing me a song,
Take me to the graveyard and lay the sod o'er me,
For I'm a poor cowboy and I know I've done wrong.

5. "Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,
Get six pretty girls to carry my pall;
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,
Put roses to deaden the clods as they fall.

Text & music: As I Walked Out In The Streets Of Laredo_Sandburg_263.pdf

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