Almeda Riddle: Background and Commentary
By Daniel W. Patterson
Song in Almeda Riddle’s Life
Almeda Riddle was born in 1898—and was a child born to sing. From the first, singing both drew her and enveloped her. Her father—a key influence—sang her to sleep with ballads when she was small. He opened and closed each day by singing from shape-note gospel tune books, his passion. She sang with him. Everywhere he lived he taught singing schools, and Almeda went along. She said that before she could read words she learned to read musical notation, and, like her father, she could write down tunes she heard.
She grew up in the southern edge of the Arkansas Ozarks in the years before the radio. Pianos were too expensive for ordinary people to own, phonographs were rare, and traveling musical shows did not come to her community. For entertainment most people simply sang. Almeda described singing when she visited with friends or walked to school or even worked at home. In one of the many interviews that folklorist Roger Abrahams edited into the book A Singer and Her Songs she told of first learning “No Telephone in Heaven” when she was a child of seven and singing it over and over while she was out with others picking cotton. One man in the group finally offered her twenty-five cents if she “would please just not sing ‘No Telephone in Heaven’ again that day.”
People in the community habitually exchanged written copies—“song ballads” or “ballets,” they called them—of pieces that struck their fancy. Almeda began collecting these as soon as she could read and in her interviews constantly mentioned ballets she begged from parents, uncles, cousins, neighbors, school mates, her future husband, or his preacher friend. She lost the collection in a tornado that destroyed her house in 1926. But one ballet that she later found tucked into a book at her mother’s home gives a direct glimpse of her childhood passion for songs. Her Uncle John had written it for her in 1906, and Almeda said he added in a note that she pestered him until he finally sang her a song. He “promised to write the ballet and give it to me if I would go to bed.”
Almeda Riddle’s Repertory
The tornado took her collection of ballets, but her memory was strong. Predictably, her song repertory was quite large. In interviews she gave varying estimates of the number she knew, ranging from two- to six-hundred songs. At least 162 different songs from her repertory are preserved in various published sound recordings or books or are included or mentioned in interviews. You can listen to eighty-five performances by her of fifty-nine different songs currently streamed on-line from the John Quincy Wolf Collection in the Lyon College Library. A Singer and Her Songs includes text and tune transcriptions of fifty of her songs and the texts or names of fifty-four more. A second volume of songs Abrahams edited from the interviews failed to gain publication. Almeda must have known many additional popular songs and pieces from the gospel tune books. She said that she had learned ninety percent of her repertory by the time she was eighteen, but she also tells of songs she learned later from her children when they were in their teens.
The Social Background of Her Life
What her repertory chiefly reflects is social change. The facts of her life provide the background. In Almeda’s childhood farming was still the “backbone” of the county. She described the typical family as putting in twelve or thirteen acres of cotton for a money crop but also planting peas, beans, potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables, and raising hogs, cows, horses, and poultry. Her father kept sheep for wool. Almeda learned to spin wool and cotton, to dye wool with walnut hulls and sumac and hickory bark, to make soap with lye leached from ashes, to crochet and quilt, to plow, care for horses, and break colts. These were old traditional skills.
But the region had more than simply a backwoods subsistence economy. Peddlers there were buying and selling surplus chickens. Almeda’s father at times added to his own income by running a peddling cart or a sorghum mill. During her childhood the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad began laying track through the county. From 1905 to 1917 her father variously bought and sold timber, served as foreman over a section crew, and traveled about to buy or inspect railroad ties for the Western Tie and Timber Company. In part of this period he ran a store (tended by his wife) and a tie yard. In the 1930s he worked in a road gang building a state highway. Almeda married in 1917, and she and her husband farmed. In 1926 her husband took a town job in a factory that made handles for tools. When he died that year from injuries in the tornado, Almeda continued to farm. During the Depression, however, she worked in a cannery established by the federal government to help farm families preserve their own produce. Their payment was a “toll” of one of every eight or twelve cans to provide food to neighbors. In the 1930s her two sons worked away from home, the older in the National Youth Administration helping build roads and two local school houses, the younger son in the Civilian Conservation Corps and then the army. Her part of the county got electricity in the 1950s through a Rural Electrification Administration cooperative. Telephones came too in the early 1960s.
Historical Layers in Her Repertory
The rapid transitions she lived through contributed layer upon layer to her repertory. Songs she learned in the 1930s and ‘40s from her children came to them from 78-rpm recordings. Some of these were polished-up traditional songs from movies with “singing cowboys.” The gospel songs she earlier learned from her father came from tune books like those issued each year across three decades by the James D. Vaughn Music Publishing Company in Tennessee and the Stamps-Baxter Music Company in Texas for “new-book” singings. Almeda must have known the occasional gem and much of the dross from this huge annual crop. She herself pointed out layers in her ballad repertory. Some came from contemporary events. Her father and a neighbor wrote “The Storm of Heber Springs” about the 1926 tornado that killed her husband and baby. Around 1909 she and a friend found a newspaper poem about Allen Bain, a boy in Illinois who had escaped hanging for murder when his supposed victim reappeared. “It had no tune,” she said, “but we couldn’t leave a thing like that go by without singing it. So he and I sat down and figured out our tune. . . . You take kids as full of singing as we were, eleven years old, we could make a tune in a few minutes if we wanted to sing—and we wanted to sing this.” From about 1904 until ’14 or ’15, she said, the railroads were growing and there were “just lots of railroad songs.” When she was twelve or fourteen she “was very much of a fan of the railroads.” To her they “represented all romance,” but she also witnessed the death of a young brakeman who fell under his train. Another brakeman taught her “The Broke Down Brakeman,” and for her the song brought poignant memories of the boy’s death. Another set of occupational songs was about cowboy life. This repertory developed mostly between 1870 and 1890. Cattle drives “used to go through the Indian Nation,” she told Abrahams, “and I guess we learned some of their songs then. We liked them; they appealed to us.” She specifically recalled learning at least one from her father’s uncle Hi James, a cowboy, who died when she was small. She also learned “Cole Younger” and “Jesse James,” ballads about desperados of the 1880s and ‘70s and was surprised to learn when she was thirteen that Jesse was a second cousin of her father, J. L. James. Her husband taught her a song about “Custer’s Last Fierce Stand” in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. And Almeda had an even earlier layer of songs from the Civil War.
Almeda Riddle described certain songs as having been known to her ancestors. One was the children’s song “La La La Chick A La Le-0.” She learned it from her mother, who learned it from her mother, who learned it when she was about seven or eight from her mother, who died soon after. That woman had come from Ireland and most likely learned it there. Almeda thought her father’s family must have brought certain other songs from England.
Scholarship rather than tradition, however, explains most of the earlier layers of Almeda’s repertory. Twenty-two of the songs—including several already mentioned—are among those cataloged by G. Malcolm Laws in his Native American Balladry (1950;1964). A few of these are based on events or figures of the colonial and later periods in America. Most simply reflect themes that came into popularity across the decades. A smaller number of songs—eight—are in Laws’ other catalogue, American Ballads from British Broadsides (1957). These date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They mostly tell stories of love—the comic or tragic or loyal loves of commoners, a pretty fair maid and a soldier, sailor, butcher boy, or weaver. Even older songs in Almeda’s repertory are ones that the Harvard scholar Francis James Child canonized in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898). She knew seventeen of these, all but one or two in remarkably full versions. Five of these ballads that date to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries are loosely historical, but mostly focus on the love sorrows of lords and ladies. The rest retell international folktales. A few that scholars trace to the late Middle Ages are the oldest songs she knew.
Almeda Riddle’s Views on Songs
Almeda had her own ideas about the songs she learned from her family and community. Her father, after singing ballads to her when she was very small, wanted her to learn to read music and began singing her mainly the gospel-tune-book songs. Almeda enjoyed those too, but she favored songs that told a story and tried to get them from everyone else. Almeda’s mother knew some of the oldest ballads, but she was reluctant to sing ones she thought risqué. Because “Black Jack Davy,” for example, told of the elopement of a girl with a Gypsy boy, she would sing only “little snatches” of it. Almeda never saw “anything particularly bawdy” in the song. Those things, she said, “happened then and they still do today.” So she got the words from an uncle and sang the song.
Almeda did avoid singing certain songs that brought back painful memories of her own losses. One of these was “Custer’s Last Fierce Charge,” which she had learned from her husband before they were married. She said, “I know all the words, but I never sing it much, though I love it, for it reminds me of singing with him.” She had similar feelings about the Scottish ballad “Mary Hamilton.” She had learned it when she was a very young child and had sung it with a sister. The early death of that sister had been traumatic for her. For a period of time she stopped singing at all, and afterwards she continued to put “Mary Hamilton” out of her mind. After she entered the Folk Revival circuit, she recalled one stanza of it and eventually recovered her complete text from the elderly woman who had originally taught it to her.
Almeda Riddle also consciously evaluated songs in her repertory. Even as a child, she said, she was always a stickler to have songs “make sense,” to have “reason and authenticity.” Common versions of the children’s song “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” for example, include a stanza about the old gray goose dying “in the millpond, standing on its head.” Almeda “never felt—not even as a child—that you could drown a goose.” She said, “You can’t drown a gosling, even—I’ve tried it. If you turn him loose he comes out of there swimming,” even a newly hatched bird. So she changed the words to “Down come a walnut and hit her on the head.” She felt free to alter words songs like this one that she used to entertain children.
Songs she regarded as “classic,” however, she would not consciously alter. She knew that minor changes of wording were inevitable from performance to performance and did not worry over them. John Quincy Wolf, who taped her singing some of her songs as many as five different times, wrote that “More than any other singer I know Mrs. Riddle tends to create as she sings—and no songs are completely exempt from change, not even the Child ballads.” He noticed changes in both words and tunes. “To her,” he said, “singing is a creative activity, and in slight and subtle ways she irresistibly makes her songs as she sings.” What Almeda seems to have meant was that she would not willingly alter the plot or meaning of a ballad.
For her what made a song a “classic” was not its age. It was that the song “teaches something that’s worth remembering, that’s worth passing on.” The lesson of a hymn like “How firm a foundation” is obvious. She found in it a strength that helped her survive very difficult times. She felt that the best ballads—ones like “Lady Gay” (“The Wife of Usher’s Well,” Child 79) in which dead sons rebuke their grieving mother--also teach. She said, “My mother sang that, so it is especially dear to me for that reason—but it does teach that you shouldn’t grieve overlong.” Grief, she goes on, is useless. “We can never return to the past and it’s best to bury the past” and “not let our tears rot the winding sheet.” About “The House Carpenter” (“James Harris, or The Daemon Lover,” Child 243), a ballad in which a woman abandons her husband and child to sail off with her lover, Almeda said, “I thought that was a terrible thing, this mother leaving that baby. That was the thing that struck me the worst, you know, the mother deserting the child.” Almeda said that even when she was still small she felt “great satisfaction” that the woman in the song drowned and “got her just desserts.”
She pondered why she felt “so strong” with a ballad like “Lady Margaret” ("Fair Margaret and Sweet William," Child 74). It told of a lady who saw her lover ride by with his new bride, died of grief, and as a ghost stood by his bed and rebuked him; stricken with remorse, he rose, kissed her dead lips, died, and was buried with her. Almeda said that “nothing like the stories they tell would ever happen to me personally.” Still, she loved it and said, “I think maybe that our best songs are our ballads. You know, happy things that tell us good news don’t make the papers as often as sad news. And most of the ballads, didn’t you ever notice that, are written about sad occurrences.” She explained, “I have always felt in sympathy with something.” And ever since she first heard the song “Lady Margaret,” she had had “a feeling of compassion for Lady Margaret. These things tell in ourselves. And I guess bringing up compassion is like teaching us, at least about ourselves.”
Her Views on Performing a Ballad
“The ballads I do,” she said in one interview with Roger Abrahams, “you’re not supposed to perform them.” To sing a ballad, or any kind of traditional song, but especially those she called “classic,” she explained, “you have to put yourself behind the song.” She added, “By that I mean get out of the way of it. Present your story, don’t perform it.” She thought the difference between herself and most “popular folksingers” was that “they do perform and put too much of themselves into it. I just get behind it. I don’t want any of Almeda Riddle there. Let’s get the picture of Mary Hamilton, the weeping, betrayed girl, before the public. And if your ballad is good enough, it’ll hold them without anything that you do. You don’t have to put any tricks to your voice or anything else, if you sing it with feeling. I do believe a ballad should be sung with feeling and with understanding.”
The “Discovery” of Almeda Riddle
Almeda Riddle, folklorist Roger Abrahams wrote in 1977, “is one of the luminaries of the folk festival circuit.” But the world outside her community on the southern edge of the Ozarks had never heard of her until 1952. In that year John Quincy Wolf, Jr., a college English teacher raised forty miles to the east, came collecting folksongs and recorded her. (Debora Kodish, in a feminist reading of this first encounter, describes Wolf as triumphant and deeply moved by his “discovery” of her singing and unaware that he had intruded into a day already hectic and exhausting for Almeda Riddle and her family.) Wolf mentioned her to Alan Lomax, who included cuts by her in an album of recordings he himself made with Ozark musicians. Five solo albums followed. Word of Almeda Riddle also reached the Newport Folk Festival, which booked her to perform. Roger Abrahams came to know her too, taped interviews, and edited them into A Singer and Her Songs: Almeda Riddle’s Book of Ballads (1970) and wrote additional essays. Almeda Riddle’s reputation became so firmly established that she received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1983, the second year the National Endowment for the Arts offered this honor. George West and his wife Starr Mitchell--then young folk-revival singers in Arkansas, now an award-winning high school teacher and a state public folklorist/historian, and still singers--had developed a friendship with her. Fortunately they undertook to make this video. By the early 1980s her voice had lost some of the freshness it had in her early recordings, but the film preserves glimpses of her singing and her personality, and it includes the NEA presentation. Almeda Riddle died three years later, in June 1986.
The Background--Literary Interests
John Quincy Wolf taught English romantic literature at a college in Memphis. In the 1950s this was not an usual background for someone with an active interest in folksong. Literary figures as different as Sir Philip Sidney in the 16th century, Samuel Pepys in the 17th, Joseph Addison in the 18th, and 19th-century writers ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Hardy and Housman for differing reasons praised, imitated, and, in the cases of Sir Walter Scott and John Clare, collected folksongs. By the middle of the 19th century leading scholars—headed by Francis James Child of Harvard and then his son-in-law and successor George Lyman Kittredge—were drawn by philological, literary, and historical interests to ballads in particular. Between 1882 and 1898 Child issued his five-volume critical edition of 305 ballad texts—The English and Scottish Popular Ballads--which Kittredge in 1904 edited down to a one-volume collection, and these led to the inclusion of ballads in anthologies of British literature and the high school and college courses they supported.
A good many scholars wrote appreciatively of the ballad itself. They described its distinctive narrative form—which typically opens near the end of the story and unfolds in action, dialogue, and image, lingering for a stanza on one intense moment, then often leaps across space and time to another, lingering on it, then leaps to another. It presents the story without overt comment or moralizing. The text itself is as reticent as the performance style that Almeda Riddle described when she said you don’t “perform” ballads, you put yourself “behind” them. A ballad text gains its power from distillation across time. Individual singers may contribute—consciously or unconsciously—imaginative touches to a song. But only those story elements that seem believable, catch the imagination, and move the heart get long remembered and passed on. Almeda learned of scholars’ explorations of the backgrounds of some of the historical ballads and thought the facts do “something for our curiosity, but not our satisfaction.” She told Abrahams, “I think as a child I enjoyed them more when I just sang them as ballads. Took them at their worth. Didn’t know they had a story behind them.”
The Background--Musical Interests
In the early 20th century a different stream of collectors—such as the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and the educator Cecil Sharp—began to find traditional singers in England and collect and publish their tunes. The Australian pianist Percy Granger even used the newly available phonograph to record their singing. By the time Sharp came to the Southern Appalachians during the First World War, college and university teachers here were beginning to gather song collections, and increasingly, to make sound recordings. Bertrand Harris Bronson eventually gathered the melodies published in print and sound recordings in Britain and America for his four-volume The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads with their Texts (1959-1972).
In the South the ballad collectors were typically members of a transitional generation born into families with a farming background but personally ambitious for education and a profession. They knew of the songs, and collecting helped them mediate their own conflicting allegiances. John Lomax was a leading figure among them. He wrote a master’s thesis at Harvard on cowboy songs he heard as a boy in Texas and became the first major field collector for the Library of Congress. And he opened the lifelong and highly important career of his son Alan and his daughter Bess Lomax Hawes.
The music proved a key to the ballad form. Each stanza holds a speech, action, image, or moment in the story and is bounded by one turn of the tune. Each line of verse is sculpted by a musical phrase into a grammatical unit. Normally the words for the first phrase of the melody—and often those for the third and even the second—will form one statement, one independent clause. The fourth line may be a shorter unit, even just a prepositional phrase, but that late in the stanza, it will be completely intelligible. This grammatical structure lets the listener effortlessly comprehend what is being sung. It produces the famous simplicity of ballad stanzas. We can see and hear this in all of Almeda’s older ballads like “The Banks of Yarrow” (“The Dowie Dens of Yarrow; Child 214):
But sister, dear, I’ve had this dream,
And I fear it means sorrow,
For I dreamed I pulled heather green
On the bonnie banks of the Yarrow.
or
Last night my bed was made full wide;
Tonight it shall be narrow.
No man shall ever sleep by my side;
My Willie’s drowned in the Yarrow.
Unlike the metrics of art poetry in English, ballad verse is “accentual.” That is, it has a fixed number of beats per line, but an irregular number of unaccented syllables. This opens the way for greater rhythmic variety in the musical phrases to which the lines are sung.
The tunes also offer several clues about the period in which a song originated. The earlier folk tunes use not only the major and minor but also a variety of seven-tone scales that classical music left behind in the Renaissance. They also use other five- and six-tone scales. In later folksong the number of scales grew more contracted. The structures of melodies that came into fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries, on the other hand, were often twice as long as those of earlier tunes. Their vocabularies also are more Latinate, their metrics more monotonous, their grammatical structures more complex, and their plots longer and more diffuse. An illustration is Almeda Riddle’s “The Texas Rangers.” A stanza printed in Abrahams’ A Singer and Her Songs reads:
And when the bugle sounded, our captain gave command.
“To arms, to arms,” he shouted, “and by your horses stand.”
I saw the smoke ascending, it seemed to reach the sky,
The first thought then that struck me, “My time had come to die.”
Printed ballad sheets, chapbooks, songsters, and newspapers influenced these later songs, although oral transmission could also wear down their vocabulary, syntax, and plot into smoother and more effective forms.
Alan Lomax on Song Style
At the time when Almeda and other traditional singers of her generation were being recorded, many people, especially in towns and cities, were embarrassed by the old rural and ethnic ways of singing. They were more comfortable with opera (which implied wealth and education) or popular theater music (which symbolized fashionable urban modernity). Rural, regional, and ethnic musical styles were gradually invading public consciousness through recordings and radio, producing country music and blues and gospel. But it took a deep acquaintance to strip away prejudice against traditional singing. Ballad singers like Almeda Riddle and the North Carolina singer Dillard Chandler and the many musicians who were masters of other genres in effect taught a generation of outsiders to understand and appreciate their art.
Alan Lomax—who across the years made field recordings of black prison work gangs, religious services, blues, jazz marching bands, Appalachian ballad singers and banjo pickers, and Cajun fiddlers, and then went over to record in the British Isles, and later in Spain and Italy—became more aware than anyone else of the diversity, beauty, and antiquity of traditional song styles. In a 1959 essay entitled “Folk Song Style” he described traditional singing world-wide as falling into ten major stylistic families that he labeled American Indian, Pygmoid, African, Australian, Melanesian, Polynesian, Malayan, Eurasian, Old European, and Modern European. And he became their most active advocate. His 1977 essay “An Appeal for Cultural Equity” is a readable and eloquent argument for the respect owed to traditional musical styles that he saw as threatened with “cultural grayout.” With radio broadcasts and published recordings he tried to share his experience of the music. Currently The Association for Cultural Equity builds on his legacy, using the internet to stream many of the albums he recorded or edited of world music. Lomax also filmed musical performances and planned one of his projects—the Global Juke Box [Link: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx_hUrevOdw&feature=youtu.be ] —as an easy way for people to see and experience the clusters of behavior that constitute a performance style: not just melodic structures and vocal timbre and preferred pitch, but also the physical behavior of the performers and their audiences, the numbers of people involved in the musical act, the psychological and emotional content of the events, and their historical and social implications. Ronald D. Cohen’s Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997 (2003) lets the reader follow Lomax’s thinking about these issues in fields he called cantometrics and choreometrics. In Folk Song Style and Culture (1968) and other works he developed a theory that song styles function as “symbols of basic human value systems.”
Almeda Riddle’s own song performances conform to his description of a “modern European” traditional song style he found stretching from Romania and Hungary across central Italy and Spain, western and Central France, Southern and Eastern England, and Lowland Scotland to colonial America. We recognize that the expectation of deference to the solo performer from a silent, attentive audience is so deeply embedded in the whole culture that it governs even the classical performance tradition in the same territory. But readers will particularly recall Almeda Riddle as they read Lomax’s description of the people singing solo songs in strong, hard voices, with a greater interest in text than tune, in this “land of the narrative ballad.”
