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PARTISAN REVIEW
But the fact is that only the most abnormal situations,
political or otherwise, kept these two folk traditions alive so late
in an industrial and urbanized Europe. The turning toward the
folk, at the end of the 19th century, was not only pre-industrial
but pre-revolutionary; and the same sort of ferments were pres–
ent in Yeats' Ireland and Lorca's Spain. The current attempts
in America to get back to primitive material are natural enough,
but they are different. They are the desire of a far from
revolutionary population to get back to some earlier fun, as well
as some earlier integrity. Certainly the material is there. We
can trace the line of the American folk song through the ballads
of English, Irish and Scotch origin (broken away from their
original scene and transformed) through the work-songs of all
kinds (sea-shantys, songs of the plantation and the cattle-range),
the hymns and spirituals, up to the beginning of town-life.
Then the culmination of the American folk-song appears.
Stephen Foster, the untrained and greatly gifted writer of "pop–
ular songs", managed to express fully the emotions common
during this period of transition. On the one hand, through him
the loneliness as well as the rough gaiety of a primitive society
found its voice. On the other, FoSII:er gave expression to some–
thing quite new: an emotion which was to become increasingly
persistent in the American spirit: the sense of profound
nostalgia for an already disappearing non-urban way of life.
The strong sentimentalization of Foster by his modem audience
proceeds from the holdover of this crucial though hidden
nostalgia into our own time. Clearly, he was the end of one
kind of American folk, the point beyond which no unadulterated
development of his kind of material was possible.
We begin to get the production of the urbanized folk,
after the hymns and marching songs of the Civil War. The
railroads building and having been built, we get the railroad
songs. The cities once made, we get the hybrid genteel, and
the barber-shop ballads, and, what is more vivid and interesting,
the songs of the "underworld": brothel, saloon, dope-joint and
prison. The earlier tradition fell into neglect as the way back
to the farm became more and more closed. It was rediscovered
and refurbished, along with hooked rugs and pine blanket chests
