Music: Folk Festival

Pretty, buxom Sarah Gertrude Knott was working for the Drama League in St. Louis when she decided her real calling was to preserve U. S. folklore. Miss Knott got help from old George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard, North Carolina’s Paul Green, the late Novelist Mary Austin and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt. By 1934 she had interested enough volunteer talent to put on the first National Folk Festival in St. Louis. She arranged the second Festival in Chattanooga, last year’s in Dallas. Envoys from colleges and towns, winners of State Festivals were welcomed. Some sponsor always paid the deficit. This year Chicago’s Adult Education Council agreed to give $12,000 and Chicago’s Orchestra Hall last week housed one more National Folk Festival. Performers traveled from States as far apart as New Mexico and Connecticut, all week did their turns. Outstanding turns:

¶ Lumberjacks from Michigan and Wisconsin arrived in boots, gay plaids, several days’ growth of beard. They sang such lumber camp ballads as Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door, danced jigs, reels, clogs. Average age of the Michigan group: 67. The Wisconsin lumberjacks played on a one-string Norwegian instrument called the salmodikon. Seventy-one-year-old Sven Svenson, in a chef’s costume, chipped a two-inch piece of birchbark from a log, put it to his lips and played a thin, shrill tune on the chip.

¶ Kiowa Indians from Oklahoma, complete with feathers and leg bells, wound through snake dances, war dances, love dances. Chief Cozad. 73, played an Indian flute.

¶ Students from Berea College, Kentucky, danced odd “running sets,” sang a version of the ballad Barbara Allen which Samuel Pepys knew. Tall, good-looking Reuben Taylor, an Oxford graduate who prefers to stay in the mountains and raise blackberries, sang ballads with Kentucky’s Homeplace Mountain Center Group.

¶ A bonneted old lady of 82 named Josephine Theriaque Caney quavered French pioneer songs that are still sung in Vincennes, Ind.

¶ Stocky little Capt. Richard Maitland, who used to sail before the mast and now lives at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, Staten Island, sang sea chanteys with more force than one would expect of a man of 80. He was still awkward with the arm that had been torpedoed years ago. With him sang young Leo Reagan, Mayor of New London, Conn.

¶ A group from Albuquerque, N. M. sang & danced most precisely, acted out a 16th-century Nativity play called Los Pastores (The Shepherds).

¶Dennis Patrick Coyle, a coalminer at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., sang Me Johnny Mitchell Man and When the Breaker Starts Up Full Time, kicked up his heels while a couple of other miners sawed on fiddles.

¶ A sample of the Christmas ball they have been holding in Anson, Tex. for more than 50 years was presented by 25 cowboys & cowgirls.

¶Nobody at the Festival caused more excitement than a bright-eyed, grey-haired woman named Mrs. Janie Brady Jones. Mrs. Jones’s dead husband, John Luther Jones, was a railroad engineer. Mrs. Jones used to call him “J. L.” but everybody else called him “Casey.” When he was killed they wrote a song about him. Widow Jones sat quietly on the platform last week while a young man sang Casey Jones as millions of Americans know it. When he got to the last two lines he stopped dead, let the riddle finish without him. Mrs. Jones considers the last two lines libelous because they represent her as telling her children :

You got another daddy

On the Salt Lake Line.

To correct the false impression thus given, Mrs. Jones nine years ago collaborated with Lysle Tomerlin in a ballad called My Husband, Casey Jones. Excerpts :

Oh, I sing oj my husband, my darling Casey Jones,

With blue eyes always smiling, with laughter in his tones ;

A-dying at the throttle upon the old I. C.,

My Casey, husband, Casey, who meant the world to me. . . .

Sometimes I wake at midnight, when all the world is dead,

And Casey, my dear Casey, seems standing by my bed;

Then I can hear him whisper, just as he used to do,

O Janie, sweetheart Janie, see, I’ve come back to you.

Chorus : . . .

Nobody ever pulled a train just as my Casey dear.

1 always dream of Casey Jones as my brave Engineer,

He knew how to live and he knew how to die.

So all who knew him loved him, and now you know why.