The following excerpts are from tape transcripts or from the correspondence of Sidney Robertson Cowell. Used with permission from the Cowell Estate.
Ford Family of Singers
“He [ singer Warde Ford ] took me to meet his mother, who had ‘given up love songs’ in favor of beautiful religious tunes, some of them already familiar to me from shaped note collections. Her high voice singing the lovely melodic line of There is a Land of Pleasure was beautiful. She was the widow of ‘Rome (Jerome) Ford, whose two surviving brothers, Charlie and Rob Ford, were especially fine singers, and whose four sons and a daughter, Hazel, all sang fine old songs, and so did their children. One of the four brothers, Warde Ford, was a really great singer, with
a shining love of woods songs from several traditions, and an enormous repertory. His uncle Rob was a great singer too, and I understand that Uncle Charlie was as fine; but he died the week before I was to have met
him.”
Driving to Madison and back
“Warde’s footsteps thudded like a cantering horse across the little beach very early one morning, to rouse me in my small cabin. He had to make the trip to Madison and back ‘on business’ and invited me to go along. I was always alert for a chance at a car ride with a singer, because singers often measure their repertories by the ability to sing without repeating yourself … so I dressed rapidly and ran up the slope to the road where Warde was waiting in the car, with a thermos of coffee and [a] bread and butter sandwich that his mother had contributed, along with a lunch box, for the trip. I foolishly thought of Madison as 80 miles away, because that was its distance from my headquarters in Milwaukee. Instead, the trip is nearly 200 miles each way and proved very long and tiring. Warde installed me comfortably in the spacious front seat of a very long, large, shiny black car, and after the sun came up I suddenly realized that I was traveling in a hearse.
Warde was being sent to bring back the body of an old lady who had died away from home. Warde sang steadily, and I had a fine time but was really exhausted by the time we reached Madison, and if I had had enough money with me, I would have gone to a hotel for the night and back to Crandon by bus the next day. But I had learned that with Warde, as with two or three other singers of my acquaintance with whom I had made long drives, my purse was likely to be levied on at roadside bars, which produced a demoralized driver fairly early in the day, and I did not care for it. I knew Mary Lafollette, daughter of the governor of Wisconsin, slightly, in Washington, and it crossed my mind to ask her mother for a bed for the night, I was so tired. But a sandwich restored my spirits. We picked up our ‘passenger’ and Warde suggested that I stretch out on a second cot in the back of the hearse, but I could not bring myself to do it, and we finally got back to Crandon, my head dazed with songs and landscapes in the moonlight.”
Missing Uncle Charlie
“His employer called him away and I heard her say: ‘Chicken tonight, Warde. You better bring your girlfriend to dinner.’ I was amused to be cast in the role of girlfriend of the hired man of the wife of the undertaker, and we accepted – explaining however, that we had an early evening engagement elsewhere. She asked us to come early so I could play some piano duets with her.
“The duet playing was interfered with, as it turned out, by some unexpected business for the undertaker, which everybody helped except me. Dinner was delayed a little, but the lady kept reminding me I had promised to play the piano with her, and I said I hoped there would be time, since I had made an engagement with a singer in the early evening. She was not a lady to take no for an answer and brushed this information aside. (In the course of the dinner, Warde made several forays out to the mortuary, remarking on the difficulty of embalming a body that was dead of a stroke, the blood vessels got blocked. I thought this was interesting, but not so interesting that I left like accepting his invitation to come with him for a demonstration.) After supper of course the dishes must be done, then there was a small emergency with one of the horses. I waited politely, and we finally sat down at the keyboard and played a couple of duets from a collection of mid-nineteenth century family songs. Then I said we must go, but this created such an uproar that I sat down again to save Warde embarrassment. I think the lady did not believe that we had any engagement except with each other, and she was teasing us by creating delays. I could not offend her on account of Warde’s job, and by the time we extracted ourselves, it was after nine o’clock and Uncle Charlie’s light was out as we drove past. I had to leave the next day but arranged to come back in two weeks and left an apologetic note
on Uncle Charlie’s porch. Warde sent me a card to say the new date was all right with Uncle Charlie, and we could come early in the afternoon. I arrived the day before this engagement, to learn sadly that Uncle Charlie had died in his sleep the night before.”
Recording Warde Ford
“I had a merry time chasing him across the United States to make good quality recordings of the songs for commercial use. He wrote me from Kansas but left for an Army post in Arizona the day I got to Kansas. When I could follow him there, he telegraphed, as I was about to leave that he was being transferred to Fort Ord, California. Then before I could
make the trip he was sent with a detachment of troops en route to the American sector in Berlin! … So I finally sat down and address the General Mark Clark indignantly, informing him that I was completely out of patience with the U.S. Army, and explaining why. I was sure that the American sector had plenty of recording machines and, aside from the interest of Folkways records, these songs had considerable American historical interest, I was perfectly sure that there was no lack of interest in this project, but it certainly was not getting done. … I never got an answer, but the new tapes duly arrived, compliments of the U.S. Army, and the General had Warde singing at his parties, and broadcasting from the Army radio station all over Europe.”
Resettlement
“Women’s clubs, all sorts of fraternal organizations, states, counties and townships all undertook to establish decent new communities made up of unemployed families, whose heads were paid for building their own new houses. This produced beautiful little communities … but as nobody had given any thought to ways of earning after the houses were
completed, people and new houses (often without furniture) were stranded, too heavy a continuing expense for the sponsors of the community. So with one accord some 20-odd such communities all presented appears for help
to President Roosevelt, within a period of a few weeks.”
“…By that time the families in the new communities, many of whom were strangers to one another or had even never before lived in a close community that required discussion and agreement on problems that concerned everybody, had become disillusioned and bitter, inclined to carry chips on both shoulders and retire sulkily desperately within their
own four walls. Word began coming in from the new community managers that the most urgent thing was a technique for getting people together on a basis that was not controversial: Could Washington supply leaders to organize dances, entertainment and other group activity, with the hope of reestablishing some of the initial good will and solidarity and hopeful approach to pressing problems with which these various communities began.”
Special Skills
“Special skills was expected to cope with the odder aspects of resettling people: furniture design for the small rooms of low-cost housing, photographers and painters for the before-and-after record of various projects; specifications for pianos for community centers; handbooks for weaving so housewives could make their own curtains, and so on and so on. Leaders of social activities had of necessity to know something about music, so Special Skills asked Charles Seeger to decide what their training should be and find people and train them for the job. Almost alone among sophisticated musicians in this country at that time, Charles Seeger recognized that we had a lively and active traditional music culture of our own, and that it was this that should be stimulated if the people themselves were ever, as it firmly intended they should, take over their own communities. Mr. Seeger felt people should be taught to value and to use what they had, what they had inherited, what was native to them. So instead of sending people with the then conventional song leaders’ training … it was proposed to introduce them to the ballads, dance songs and fiddle
tunes of rural America, with traditional square dancing and an ear for tall tales and salty mountain speech.”
***
“I have wanted for a long time to see a Ford Family collection appear: the variety is fantastic: fine Child ballad versions, loggers’ songs, local songs, a couple of shaped note hymns. It would have to be sung chiefly by Warde, but there are also a few records by his two brothers and his uncle Rob or Bob Walker. By extending it to Ford family friends, you could present a fine logging community cross-section with, I think, enough variety. I have hesitated to suggest this, as it seems a funny subject for editing by a woman, but after all it is something I know very well: I sent many weeks being shown around by the Fords in Wisconsin, visiting logging camps and mills…”
Trip to Crandon
“I forgot to tell you to drop in on L.G. Sorden, Farm Security Administration, Rhinelander, Wis. He was to look out for singers for me, and is a peach of a guy, much entertained by the funny times I had. He’s the man who inquired on my third trip to Crandon whether I’d found any men living with their wives yet in that town. I had noticed the domestic mortality rate seemed excessively high but I supposed that was because most of my acquaintances were made in the bar where I recorded — a natural place for drowning domestic sorrows. “There’s the guy that run off with my brother’s wife,” remarked one man calmly to me one evening, as a gaunt individual opened the door and shut it again. Another time, at the movies I sat next two women whose husbands were stabber and stabee in a famous fight. Stabbee died, stabber was sentenced to life, and the wives seemed to have been brought together by common hard luck, as nearly as I could make out.[ Handwritten ] They were sharing a house.[
End of handwriting ]
— Sidney Robertson letter to Alan Lomax, July 10, 1938.
Cabin on the Lake
“I lived in a small match-box of a cabin on a perfectly round, tiny lake, grassy on my side and fringed with pine to the water’s edge across from me. The far shore belonged to a Chippewa Indian reservation and squaws came down for water and I could hear drumming and occasional singing. I was 3 blocks from the center of the sprawling town of Crandon but it was very remote-seeming and nice. Lest I be lonely a cat adopted me; I cooked one thing at a time on a very small sheet-iron stove and was blissfully content. Most of the oddest and most interesting specimens among the jacks and Kaintucks came to see me and sing and tell stories.One gargling Kentucky specimen had just made a trip to and from Harlan County and he mentioned he had spent several hours between trains in Chicago. ‘Jeepers cramps but they’re moughy behin’ on their haulin’ in that town, I never seed sech a flyin’ aroun’, nowhar I ever been.’”
Typing on coffins
“Conversations at the Ross’ were distinctly macabre from my point of view; and I declined several invitations, offered with pardonable professional pride, to admire a particularly expert ‘job’… all of which I declined only to run full tilt into two separate corpses, one in each ‘Viewing Room,’ the night I went in to say goodbye. …My last hour in Crandon (my goodness, ‘my last hour!’– I’ve taken on the jargon too!) – Just before I left Crandon, let’s say, I climbed up into a loft with my typewriter, and sat on a stack of Mr. Ross’ ‘stock’ – coffins carefully packed in lovely pine boxes to take down the words of some last songs from Boney, who was soaping saddles. In their odd moments the Ross’ run several saddle camps adjoining summer resorts, during the summer season.”
“Just before I left I was invited to spend any evenings I could at a lumber camp 30 miles northeast of Crandon, where the jacks sing, dance and tell stories just as they always have. In many ways logging has changed; but many of the same men winter year after year in the camps and do a full days work without thinking anything of it almost into their seventies. Then (says Mr. Ross) they die off sudden by the side of the road and are buried by the county. [Handwritten]“No money in it for the business.”[End of handwriting]
The Recorder
“When I arrived on the scene he [ Charles Seeger ] was engaged in a long war with the Bureau of the Budget over his request for a portable recording machine. There were only two or three such in existence then. … After repeated requests for a recording machine and repeated refusals for from the Budget Director, who was understandably puzzled by the need of such a thing, or by anything to do with folksong at all, for people whose first need was money for food, Adrian Dornbush, Charlie’s boss, head of the Special Skills Division (who was a long-time acquaintance of Mrs. Roosevelt) too the problem to Mrs. Roosevelt, who “spoke to her husband” and FDR then said to the Budget Director, “Oh hell, let them have their recording machine!” The machine with battery and transformer cost around $1800 then, and the various units totaled some 1200 lbs. It arrived soon after I did, and Charlie, who loved beautiful equipment, hovered over it like a duck with one duckling.”