Editor’s Introduction

Summary

These three short writings are important scholarly and pedagogical works on folk song by Ruth Crawford Seeger which have not been readily available.

The exact provenance of “Pre-School Children and American Folk Music,” as well as the date of its presentation and writing, is uncertain. The manuscript source for this talk is a typescript, with a few pencil indications. It may be a written version of, or notes for, a presentation RCS made to the Music Educator's National Conference in Philadelphia, which involved a group of participating children. Charles Seeger discusses this event and a similar one for television, in “Remembering Ruth Crawford Seeger: An Interview with Charles and Peggy Seeger” (by Ray Wilding-White in American Music 6, no. 4 [Winter 1988]: 442–54). Sidney Cowell remembers “a demonstration … with a group of children, presented I think for the MENC or some such organization.” (Gaume, 114) Gaume cites it as being “not long before her death” (104), and discusses what could be another possible occasion for this talk (113–14): a presentation at the “Shoreham Hotel for the annual Music Teachers National Convention” (but this appears to be in the early 1940s). If the event that Charles Seeger refers to is the occasion for this manuscript, it is almost certainly before 1950. Mike Seeger confirms this (personal conversation), suggesting it is probably from the late 1940s, when she was working on the three books of children's songs. This talk was also published as an appendix in Gaume.

“Keep the Song Going!” and the review of John N. Work's American Negro Songs for Mixed Voices are short writings on American folk song in which many of the ideas and philosophies of The Music of American Folk Song are applied. Some of “Keep the Song Going!” may consist of the “published version” of the ideas in “Pre School Children and American Folk Music” (as in the title itself, which is an important point in the lecture). “Keep the Song Going!” is similar in tone and philosophy to the introductions of RCS's published folk song books for children.