FOLK MUSIC. Folk music is musical material that usually originated in the forgotten or dimly remembered past and has been passed from one generation to the next down to the present. It exists in the forms of tunes, songs, and ballads. Folk tunes are traditional melodies such as those played by fiddlers. Folk songs are melodies with accompanying verses. Ballads are folk songs that tell stories. Some folk music is utilitarian; that is, it accompanies an activity such as work, worship, or dance. Other folk music exists just for the stories it tells or the feelings it expresses. Texas folk music is "Texas" only because it passed through the state during the course of its transmission. Its traditional nature means that it was played or sung long before being brought to Texas.

There are as many varieties of folk music in Texas as there are cultures that came to Texas. Anglo-Texan folk music, the dominant strain, has taken the forms of tunes, songs, and ballads. Much of the history of Texas is accompanied by folk music. "Shoot the Buffalo" and "Texas Boys" describe early attitudes toward settling Texas. "The Greer County Bachelor" and "Little Old Sod Shanty" tell of life on the Texas frontier. "Buffalo Skinners" is the story of the rigors of a buffalo hunt in the 1870s, and "The Old Chisholm Trail" describes the life of the Texas trail-driving cowboy of the same period. According to tradition, Texans marched into battle at San Jacinto to the tune of "Will You Come to the Bower?" They fought the Mexicans again in 1846, to the sweet strains of "Green Grow the Lilacs." Fifteen years later Hood's Texas Brigade^qv marched off to the Civil War^qvto the "Yellow Rose of Texas." "Texas Rangers" was a song about one of that heroic group's early adventurers, and "Sam Bass" was a ballad about the other side of the law. Later events such as the Galveston hurricane of 1900,^qvthe Dust Bowl and Great Depression,^qqvand the Kennedy assassination^qvwere memorialized in folk songs. Now, however, topical folk songs have generally lost out to news media and copyrighted popular music.

In Texas, as elsewhere, children's songs fall into two categories, songs sung to children and songs sung by children. The first song a child usually hears is a lullaby like "Babes in the Woods," sung to the child to put it to sleep. Then children are patty-caked, bounced, and counted to in chants and songs whose purpose is to entertain. These simple songs and later more complicated traditional songs, such as "Froggie Went a-Courtin'" and "Fox Is on the Town," are sung to children. The songs sung by children are simple and basic. They begin with simple game songs like "London Bridge," grow to elaborate jump-rope chants and songs, and conclude with such crudities as "The Monkey Wrapped His Tail Around the Flagpole." Perhaps the last realization of children's songs is the fraternity-party song.

Love has spawned a world of songs and ballads that have made their ways into the Texas repertoire. The most venerable of these were Child's ballads, so called after Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98). Two of the best known of these in Texas were "Barbara Allen" and "Fair Eleanor." Both of these ballads told stories of love affairs that ended in death. Many other English ballads not blessed with the stamp of Child's approval came to Texas. These included "My Horses Ain't Hungry," "Roving Gambler," and "Little Sparrow." Most Anglo-Saxon love songs, including "Wildwood Flower," "Fond Affection," and "Columbus Stockade Blues," relate in some way to the Old World. "Careless Love" is an Anglo response to the black blues tradition. Such love ballads as "Rosewood Casket" and "Bury Me Beneath the Willow" filtered down into the folk idiom from Tin Pan Alley. Though these late-nineteenth-century weepers were not authentic folk music, they became a much-loved part of the singing traditions of Texas.

One of the most popular forms of folk music on the Texas frontier was square-dance music with a lead fiddle. The tunes played were old jigs and reels and hornpipes that were ancient in the British Isles when the settlers first came to the New World. Many of the tunes, like "Irish Washerwoman," "The Campbells are Coming," and "Sailor's Hornpipe," stayed close to their originals. Most underwent subtle and gradual changes as they were passed along from one fiddler and generation and area to another, and now only a hint of their Old World ancestry remains. Most of the early dancing was group dancing, for which a leader called the steps and patterns while the music was being played. Sometimes fiddle tunes became songs when lyrics were thrown in between calls. In the evolution of some fiddle-dance songs-"Sally Goodin," "Cindy," "Cotton-Eyed Joe," and "Old Joe Clark," for instance-the calls were dropped and the words became almost as important as the tunes. Fiddlers took their tunes and songs from everywhere, but their richest source during the nineteenth century was black minstrelsy, where they found the classic "Arkansas Traveler," "Turkey in the Straw," "Buffalo Gals," and "Old Dan Tucker." The purest of old-time fiddle music can best be found nowadays at fiddle contests held all over Texas, for instance at the annual Crockett World Champion Fiddler Contests held on the second Friday of June. Some of the favorite tunes played there and at other Texas contests are "Billy in the Low Ground," "Sally Johnson," "Durang's Hornpipe," "Devil's Dream," and "Tom and Jerry." Such fiddling dance music as that played by Bob (James Robert) Wills^qvand Milton Brown^qv in the 1930s became modern country music.^qv

Another folk song-and-dance tradition is the play party. Many early Texas settlers were fundamentalists who believed that dancing and fiddle music were sinful. They satisfied the universal urge to move to music with the play party, which was song-accompanied dance that allowed no instruments. They called their rhythmical group movements "marches" or "games," they danced in rings or in longways formations but never in squares, and they swung each other by hand, never by the waist. They used many popular dance tunes—"Old Clark," "Old Dan Tucker," "The Gal I Left Behind Me," "Willis in the Ballroom"—but because of the lack of instrumental music, the words became all-important. Play-party songs have preserved many stanzas that were lost in the fiddle-dance tradition. A play party usually began with a choosing game such as "Needle's Eye" or "Hog Drovers," then progressed to ring-game songs like "Saro Jane" or "Coffee Grows on White Oak Trees," and in full swing went into longways dances like "Weevily Wheat," "Little Brass Wagon," and "Baltimore." Play parties were not only popular among fundamentalists; they were necessary when no musician was around. In spite of the reservations laid on the players by their elders, play-party songs and formations were just as joyful and exuberant as their sinful fiddling square-dance counterparts.

One of the richest veins in Texas folk music is its religious strain, and the particular kind to which the state owes the most is Sacred Harp music,^qvnamed after B. F. White's 1844 songbook, Sacred Harp. The tunes and words in this book, still much used in Texas, go back to the Great Revival on the southern frontier at the turn of the nineteenth century, then beyond to the British Isles. Southern preachers found themselves with vast congregations and no songs, so they took familiar popular tunes and put religious words to them. A ballad about Captain Kidd the pirate became "Wondrous Love," and "Auld Lang Syne" became "Hark! From the Tomb." Music in this tradition also employed easily remembered single lines and repeated refrains, in which substitutions of words prolonged the song and increased its intensity. "We Have Fathers Over Yonder," with its simple refrain "Over yonder ocean," could continue as long as substitutions could be made for "fathers." The same was true with the song that began, "You [or "Father," "Mother," "Jesus," etc.] got to walk that lonesome valley." A final influence on Sacred Harp singing was the eighteenth-century singing schools that taught shaped notation. Because it is written in the shaped notes called, since medieval times, fa, sol, la, etc., Sacred Harp music is also called fasola music. The fasola tradition and the "fuguing tunes," whose counterpoint and joyful play of rounds was popular with early singing masters, lost their popularity in the East but became a vehicle for religious enthusiasm in the South and an integral part of Sacred Harp singing, which often lasted all day and was accompanied with "dinner on the grounds."

A modern outgrowth of early Sacred Harp is gospel music.^qv It is livelier than Sacred Harp, more concerned with the play of tune and tempo, and more optimistic in tone. It started to develop at the beginning of the twentieth century and culminated in 1926 with the founding in Dallas of the Stamps-Baxter Music Company.^qv Stamps-Baxter music used the idioms of jazz^qv and popular music and incorporated most modern instrumentation. All-day gospel singing can be found in just about any county in Texas on any weekend. It is a religious folk-music form that is still growing.

Though cowboy songs were sung all across the cow-country frontier of the United Sates, these folk songs and ballads are still most closely associated with Texas. The Texas cowboy originated in the 1860s and 1870s, when cattlemen began trailing herds to the newly established railheads in Kansas. His skills were derived from the vaquero,^qv his Spanish and Mexican forbear, who had been working large herds for 300 years. The cowboys' mores were Southern. Many men left their Southern homes after the surrender at Appomattox to start again in Texas, and they brought with them the hymns, minstrel songs, and sentimental ballads that were their tradition. Some of the old songs were rewritten to fit the new way of life. "Little Old Log Cabin" furnished the tune for "Little Joe the Wrangler." An old song about a dying English soldier became "The Streets of Laredo." The sad tale of a sailor buried at sea became "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," and "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" furnished the tune for "The Cowboy's Dream." Some cowboy songs exist in differing versions, one traditional and one written. D. J. O'Malley claimed "When the Work's All Done This Fall," and Jack Thorp wrote "Little Joe the Wrangler." Both men put their lyrics to tunes already traditionally circulating.

In the 1930s, cowboy songs and the cowboy mystique formed the basis for western swing, which was the primary antecedent of modern country music.

Country music, the modern heir to traditional Texas folk music, incorporates both the earthy themes of traditional music and the elemental three-chord sounds. Country bands also regularly include such folk classics as "Cotton-Eyed Joe," "Wildwood Flower," and "Careless Love" in their repertoires. Commercial country music, which developed in the 1920s, combined Anglo folk music, old-time religion, and elements of nineteenth-century show business. See also AFRICAN AMERICANS, CZECHS, GERMAN MUSIC, BLUES, CORRIDOS, MUSICA NORTEÑA, FOLK FESTIVALS, MILTON BROWN AND HIS MUSICAL BROWNIES, and FUNDAMENTALISM.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Francis Edward Abernethy, Singin' Texas (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1994). John A. and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910; rev. ed., New York: Macmillan, 1945). Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). William A. Owens, Swing and Turn: Texas Play-Party Games (Dallas: Tardy, 1936). William A. Owens, Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). William A. Owens, Texas Folk Songs, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society 23 (Austin: Texas Folklore Society, 1950; 2d ed., Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1976).

Francis E. Abernethy