Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

---

[503] current in the United States includes many groups. There are English and Scottish traditional ballads and songs, and Irish and pseudo-Irish ballads and songs. There are songs of the tragic death of the true love, and dying messages and confessions, some of these imported and some not. There are picturesque songs of pioneer and Western life, songs of criminals and outlaws, of soldiers and wars, of tragedies and disasters, and even of the lost at sea. Sentimental songs play an important role; and religious and moralizing songs, political campaign songs, humorous songs, negro and pseudo-negro and Indian songs, appear. And, finally there are sequence songs and rhymes, singing games, movement songs, nursery rhymes, and the like. All these belong to ‘folk-song.’ For songs are folk-songs if the people have liked them and preserved them—if they have ‘lived in the folk-mouth’—and if they have persisted in oral currency through a fair period of years. Questions of origin, quality, technique, or style, are secondary. Attempts at differentiating traditional songs into ‘popular songs,’ or songs made for the people, and ‘folk-songs,’ or songs made by the people, based on some hypothetical manner of origin or on the continuation of a medieval style are undependable and unsafe. This has been demonstrated many times, when the origin of any body of folk-songs is subjected to study. Whatever has commended itself to the folk-consciousness and has established currency for itself apart from written sources is genuine folk-literature.

An early mention of popular song in America occurs in an entry in the diary of Cotton Mather for 27 September, 1713:

‘I am informed, that the Minds and Manners of many people about the Countrey are much corrupted by foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Peddlars carry into all parts of the Countrey. By way of antidote, I would procure poetical Composures full of Piety, and such as may have a Tendency to advance Truth and Goodness, to be published, and scattered into all Corners of the Land. There may be an extract of some, from the excellent Watt's Hymns.’

Doubtless many legendary and romantic ballads were brought from England by the colonists, but probably Mather's ‘foolish songs and ballads’ did not refer to these but rather to convivial, sentimental, or humorous ditties, the street pieces