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Synopsis
This collection of songs began, William A. Owens tells us, with those sung in his home in the Pin Hook community, "where ballads and songs and spirituals seeped as easily as words" into his memory. Collecting became a serious project with him in his last college year, when he began a study of Texas play-party songs.
Owens's earliest collecting with sound equipment--an antique Vibronmaster that embossed on aluminum discs recordings best played back with a cactus thorn--began in 1937. Over the next three years he collected more than three hundred recordings and much knowledge of Texas people and their ways. In 1941, the president of the University of Texas authorized the formation of a library of recordings of Texas folk music and appointed Owens as researcher. In nine months he traveled thousands of miles and recorded (now with more sophisticated equipment) the beginning of a library that has become representative of the wide variety of Texas folk songs.
The 135 songs included in this edition of Texas Folk Songs, a number of them in versions by more than one singer, are divided into nine chapters containing British popular ballads, Anglo-American ballads, Anglo-American love songs, Anglo-American comic songs, songs and games for children, play-party songs and games, Anglo-American spirituals, Afro-American spirituals, and Afro-American secular songs. The British ballads were brought to America in the seventeenth century and later were carried westward to Texas by the adventurous pioneers who settled the state. The songs have changed with time and distance from their British background.
The American ballad section is full of the stories of battles, crimes, and catastrophes that appealed as subjects to our country's folk singers when they adapted the British ballad tradition to their own use. There is heroism aplenty in these ballads; but when it came to love, the American singers deserted the heroically tragic tales of British balladry for mournful, plaintive songs in which the sad lover has nothing much to do but waste away in sorrow. These songs helped Texas pioneer women--and men also--find release from the stern frontier life by "having a good cry." On the other hand humor, too, helped--raw, rugged, raucous humor, as the section of comic songs demonstrates.