The thread What region does the Country music accent represent got me thinking: what is the folk music from the Northeastern part of the United States? What is the folk music of the settlers to Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, and other such areas? I assume most of these immigrants were English just as most immigrants to the South were Scots-Irish. Did they bring with them any kind of English folk music which evolved into some kind of equivalent to country music?
As far as I know, the primary music in the New England area were ballads from the British Isles. As some of these people migrated southwards, they brought these ballads with them. Some of them settled in the Appalachians. Over time, this music evolved with the introduction of instruments such as the mandolin, then the guitar.
Even though it evolved, though, it did not do so in New England. One fine example is the English ballad “Barbara Allen”, which continued to be sung in the ballad form in New England, but became a staple of most string and jug bands in the Appalachians. Farther south it was even sung in the bluegrass style, which is a direct contributor to what we know today as country music. Even The Everly Brothers, who were from Kentucky, sang a version of it on one of their early albums, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us.
BTW I neglected to say that eventually, locally written ballads appeared in New England and songs about local subject matter as well, but they adhered to the same style as those brought from the British Isles, as well as being sung in the “Come all you…” style.
So did rural New Englanders just not play any music or what? Or did they keep on singing the same English songs they always did? Is there any kind of folk music scene in the Northeast that is distinctively rooted in that region of the country?
It took a while for them to play music, because most of the early music was Puritan church music. The Puritans, of course were against any other type of music they considered secular, and in fact didn’t even include instruments in their services. Other denominations, however, used the organ, but organs were expensive, so lesser instruments were allowed: the bass fiddle, trombone, cornet, flute, bassoon, clarinet were in use in many churches, which led to the establishment of church bands.
It has been discovered in the Boston area that many of these instruments and more were also privately owned, and dance music was popular as well as Broadside Ballads despite the condemnation of these by some churches.
From Wikipedia, which goes into great detail: *Though there is much in primary sources referring to folk music of the time, it is virtually all written by those who condemned the songs as uncouth. As such, little is objectively known. There was a distinction between the “Regular Singing” style of zealous reformers, mostly clergymen educated at Harvard, and the “Common Way” of the folk. Reformers included prominent clergymen like Thomas Walter and Nathaniel Chauncey, many of whom regarded their style of “regular” singing as more sophisticated as well as more devout. The evidence, however, indicates that the common people’s music was more complex, using techniques like ornamentation.
The formation of schools and societies promoting regular singing helped to spread the practice, and instruction books were published.
In the 18th century, Americans composed a number of their own hymns, often based on the Old Testament; the English nonconformist Isaac Watts, especially his Hymns and Spiritual Songs, was also very popular. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, played a major role in revivalist hymnody after a trip to Georgia in 1735 at the invitation of James Oglethorpe. Wesley and his brother, Charles Wesley, went with Oglethorpe and twenty-six Moravian missionaries. The Moravian singing inspired John Wesley to study their music. He published a collection of translations of German hymns in 1737, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, then return to England in 1738, attending meetings of the Moravian Brethren in London. There, during a reading of Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, Wesley had a spiritual experience and found his faith in Christ rejuvenated.
After returning to America, Wesley became an important preacher in a rise of fervent Christianity called the Great Awakening, along with George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, among others. Wesley and his brother began writing a number of hymns, at first just words, and then with music beginning with a collection usually called the Foundery Collection.
Wesley and some other preachers fought against the embellishment of his hymns. In 1761, Wesley’s collection Select Hymns, with Tunes Annext: Designed Chiefly for Use of the People Called Methodists directly singers to follow the tunes “exactly as printed” and to “sing in tune”; both directions were impractical, since most of the worshippers likely couldn’t read music or carry a tune.
Nevertheless, the Great Awakening (and other hymnal styles from New England) spread south and changed from Wesley’s strict formulas. John Cennick (known for widespread hymns like “Jesus My All to Heaven Is Gone”) and John Newton are likely the two most important individuals in the creation of Great Awakening-era hymns, which were sung at camp meetings. These hymns, sung at large gatherings, especially in the south, provided a basis for gospel and blues in the late 19th and early 20th century. Some of the common features included Cennick’s innovation of hymns sung as a dialogue, as well as Newton, a former slave trader who converted after reading On the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, whose wrote more than two hundred hymns that drew on his own experiences wrestling with sin, and proved extremely popular.
Compared with the older songs, Wesley and other new composers wrote with a simple structure. Rural farmers and workers expanded on these structures, creating complex songs which some musical conservatives railed against to no avail. It was in this context that a wave of itinerant singing masters, including William Billings, arose, creating hymns that remain standard across the country. This field was called the First New England School. Following Billings’ pioneering footsteps were Supply Belcher, Andrew Law, Daniel Read, Jacob Kimball, Jeremiah Ingalls, John Wyeth, James Lyon, Oliver Holden, Justin Morgan and Timothy Swan.
The First New England School is usually considered the first uniquely American invention in music. The most characteristic feature was that the voices, male and female respectively, doubled their parts in any octave in order to fill out the harmony; this generated a texture of close-position chords that was unknown in European traditions.
William Billings was of special importance and popularity. A native of Boston, Billings was a tanner by trade, and was mainly self-taught in music. He did not always follow the standard rules of composition in his works, and has thus been called the “first American composer to emphasize strongly a creative independence and to flaunt his personal idiosyncrasies in both his music and (especially) his published writings”. He taught a famous singing school in Stoughton, Massachusetts in 1774. A few of the singers later formed the Stoughton Musical Society, a choral organization consisting of 25 men.
Supply Belcher, born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, though later based out of Farmington, Maine, is also especially well-known. His only published tunebook was 1794’s The Harmony of Maine, which included anthems, fuging pieces, psalms and hymns, a number of which were secular. His songs were distinctively folky and down-to-earth. His contemporary Daniel Read, a Massachusetts-born musician who later moved to New Haven, Connecticut, was a popular musician who supported himself almost entirely off the sale of tunebooks. His first publication was entitled The American Singing Book; or, a New and Easy Guide to the Art of Psalmody Devised for the Use of Singing Schools in America. The title’s use of psalmody is here referring to singing societies which were spreading across the country, and is used without religious connotations.
Billings, Belcher and Read were the beginning of a chain of tunebook compilers that grew increasingly secular, as the art of psalmody lost its religious importance. Other Massachusetts-born compilers followed in their footsteps, beginning with Jeremiah Ingalls of Newbury, Vermont. Their songs were generally fugues, and were disapproved of by religious authorities. Andrew Law was an important compiler as well; he felt that American music should be more like European, and is best known for organizing singing schools and tunebooks. In addition, he composed several songs of note, and invented a kind of musical notation called shape note.
The music of New England quickly spread south, facilitated by the invention of the shape note notation. Andrew Law was the prime mover of shape note, which was a system of notation using different symbols for each of the four syllables used (in the fa-so-la-mi tradition). Later, three more symbols were added to correspond to the modern solfege. The different schools of shape-note singing are sometimes referred to as fasola.*
Fascinating stuff - thanks. I wonder if this stuff still has any kind of following?
Shape Note singing is alive and well - http://fasola.org/
You could argue that whaling songs and sea shanties are Northeastern folk music. The book Rise Up Singing captures lots of American folk songs with a bit of emphasis on the northeastern tradition, although it has stuff from all over.
Very true, and whaling songs and sea shanties are basically Broadside Ballads.
Look a little farther north – this type of music doesn’t stop at the border. What kind of music is associated with Nova Scotia and Newfoundland?
Exactly the same thing.
Years ago, NPR did a series on vanishing New England songs and traditions. In the late 1940’s, the wife of a senator from Vermont (forget her name) had a project to save the traditions. She went around Vermont, making sound recordings of the old people singing their traditional songs. I wish i could remember the series. anyway, one type of song was one where the singer would sing the letters of the alphabet, with a ballad-type song…something like “A” is for apples, etc.
What is this type of ballad known as?
As a shapenote singer I sing it regularly. Another interesting take is the “Northern Roots” music of Tim Eriksen.
Putting in a shout for the Shakers, and their songs which live on.
Wow, so we owe bluegrass music to New England? :rolleyes:
The Southern Appalachians, from which Bluegrass sprang were populated largely from the Virginia and Carolina colonies (indentured servants whose term of service was up were shifted westward toward the Appalachian frontier) and the later Ulster Scot migration. The English settlers in Virginia and elsewhere brought their ballads with them. They didn’t need help from the johnny-come-lately Puritans in New England.
There’s whole genre of Erie Canal folk music. It has a lot of Irish influence, as many of the Canal workers were Irish immigrants. I have a CD of it, and almost all the songs are vaguely familiar to me because I remember my grandparents singing them. It struck me as sad that the generation that actually knows them (as opposed to geeky people who buy CDs at historical society gift shops) is dying out.
The “fifteen miles on the Erie Canal” is probably the one that people today are likely to know, but there were tons of songs. Crazy.
Well let me tell you of the story of a man named Charlie on a tragic and fateful day…
There was a concert at the library Sunday, a gent doing a program titled “Folk Songs from New York’s Farms”. He sounded remarkably like Willie Nelson, with acoustic guitar.
=] I got my husband a Boston metro token way back in the 90s because of the song … I told him I would never leave him stranded on the subway =)
So the Yankees didn’t sing or play instruments for the same reasons they didn’t make whiskey, keep slaves, or conduct blood feuds.
And now instead of tokens we have Charlie Cards and Charlie Tickets.
They did keep slaves for a time, as any student of the Salem witch trials would know. 
As has been said, sea-shanties and of broadside ballads could certainly be argued to be Northeastern folk music. And as In Winnipeg pointed out, the Scottish and Irish traditions that are the foundations for much Maritime Canadian folk music have a long tradition in New England as well.
Also, the demographics of New England are just different from the South. Irish, Italian, Portuguese, and French Canadian immigrants (among others) have been a huge part of New England culture for a long time, each bringing their own musical traditions.
That said, what about Contra dance? I’ve always considered Contra to be something of a native New England folk music. Not too popular these days, but there are still musicians performing in the style, and they still hold dances in a lot of rural New England locales. As a Celtic musician I’ve always found the musical style intriguing, a blend of Scots, Irish, and French Canadian influences with a distinctly American feel.