My Precarious Life in the Public Domain

MUSIC

by JOHN JACOB NILES

THESE notes, based on my diaries and field notebooks, have been carefully selected. They have been selected for the purpose of establishing certain facts concerning some of my “folk songs.”

In the summer of 1907, when I was just rising fifteen, I was greatly moved by a girl about my own age, a girl with blond hair and blue eyes and a disturbing way of swishing her skirts as she walked. I thought myself a musician. I was already a singer — was actually singing in choirs and choruses. The girl of the blond hair thought me a farm hand and said so.

On my father’s farm worked a Negro named Objerall Jacket. He was a happy fellow of undetermined age and a singer like myself. He earned his pay by digging ditches and laying tile drainpipes. As he dug, he sang, and for more than two years he sang: —

My sense of pitch told me that he was singing in the key of F and that the only notes he employed were the third and tonic in that scale. I thought of discussing a possible variation on these two notes, but I never did.

instead I wrote three verses of text on the subject nearest my heart and composed what seemed to be characteristic music. Suddenly I had a song. It was an extraordinary experience. I had been singing the folk music of our family for years, but never had I created something all my own. Nowadays, when I come upon a new idea, I still have that exhilaration. The diary — July 19, 1907 — simply says: “Used Objerall Jacket’s ‘go way from my window’ line to make up a song. She didn’t like it.”

Objerall Jacket never knew I used his one line of text, and the girl with the blond hair and blue eyes didn’t care whether I did or not. She simply wrote me an overpolite letter and told me that my little composition only proved what she had long suspected — namely, that I was a farm hand and not a musician, “Go back to t he plow, Johnnie, that’s where you belong.”

I soon discovered that the people around me were vastly amused by my continued efforts in the field of song composition. I did not cull it “folk music.” In fact, I did not know the term in those faraway days. The ballad and the carol were called “old-timey songs.” The musically educated public thought old-timey songs were so “quaint,” and when I sang them, they thought I was “cute.” It was a terrible period. “Go Way from My Window” went into the space reserved for cast-off music: under the seal of the piano bench. I didn’t touch it again for nearly twenty years.

Meanwhile, the public had had a change of heart. The First World War had been fought, and the American people were beginning to take notice of America. I do not mean that the word Americana was bandied about as it was later — in the thirties and forties but the native scene was being studied. Gecil Sharp had already been to the United Stales and had discovered more important folk music in current use here than he had ever dreamed of in England.

In December, 1927, a group of Princeton University alumni engaged me for an evening of folk music. No arias, no art music, j ust plain folk music. That was the first time 1 ever sang “Go Way from My Window” to an informed group of cosmopolitan Americans. They seemed to like it. At least, they did not walk out on me. After the performance (it ran for an hour and a half, and included twenty numbers), 1 hey paid me actual cash dollars. Quite a lot of them.

I knew I had made a start. What I did not know was that my little love song, “Go Way from My Window,” would be taken over by many a selfappointed folk singer and be palmed off on an unsuspecting public as a little ditty which the singer learned while being jounced on his grandpappy’s knee. 1 have even heard “Go Way from My Window” called a “song of Elizabethan origin.” I’m ready to admit I’m old — but not that old.

There is, of course, the other side of the ledger. To the thoroughbreds of the concert stage who have sung “Go Way” and some of my other songs 1 am deeply indebted. When they —and by “they” I mean people like Gladys Swarthout, Eleanor Steber, John Charles Thomas, Mack Harrell, and others — sing my music, or the music of any composer, they credit the source. If they sing folk music, they say so. And if they sing composition, they say so. And no stuff and nonsense about finding “this little gem ” in some cozy little valley.

Folks with a legalistic turn of mind may be interested to know that “Go Way from My Window” was widely plagiarized in spite of the fact that it was copyright in 1934 as an unpublished manuscript. It was published in 1944 — five years after I had recorded it for Victor Red Seal.

As soon as the record was released, the trouble began. Charles O’Connell, then musical director for the Red Seal Division of RCAVictor, warned me it would happen. “Johnnie,” he said, “you will soon begin to hear a lot of phony versions of your recorded items. That is what usually happens. Singers are such poor musicians, as a rule, they don’t buy printed music if they can avoid it. They buy records and learn their songs by ear. Of course, they have to buy copies of the music when they go to perform — that is, if they use piano accompaniment — but meanwhile they are going to sing your ditties by ear.”

Never was the statement better proved than by the history of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.”

In 1932 I ran upon a group of shingle-rivers at Ary, Kentucky. Among them were a man and his wife who offered to swap songs with me. This is always the best way of getting songs from mountain people. So we swapped. One of 1 heir offerings was a rather dismal version of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” — melodically dismal, though blessed with exquisite lyrics. I wrote down what they sang, and later spent a good deal of time devising what 1 hoped would he a more graceful tune. At first the result was a straight major key melody, which was widely performed as a duet. Later I revised the tune completely, and the result was a much more effective melody in the Mixolydian mode.

When my imitators got hold of this Mixolydian tune — that is, when they purchased the record - they must have been dismayed by its difficulty, because every one of them simplified it. The fact that the song was published and copyright in 1936 — three years before I recorded it for Victor Red Seal— was no hindrance. When I hear people tell me that “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair" is in the public domain, I am vastly amused. Yes, the lyrics are in the public domain, and there are several public-domain tunes in the Library of Congress Folk Song Archive. But my heartbreaking Mixolydian melody is straight composition from the first note to the last. I lay no claim to the illiterate improvisations being offered hither and yon. But I do wish my plagiarizers had been a little more informed and could have sung the tune as written.

The pay-off was “Venezuela.” That is to say, it paid off everyone but the composer. It might, even have paid me off if I had known it was loaded. But I was a very young man when I wrote “Venezuela,” and although I had sung dozens of folk ballads, much popular music, many Army songs, the tenor parts in nearly all the standard oratorio works, I was still unused to the sharp practices of the publishing business and a complete amateur at copyright law.

The story of “Venezuela” is all in the book— my notebook. The pages are yellow and the writing is faded, but it is all there.

The night was dark, and the fog-bound harbor of Boulogne, France, was full of ships. It was October, 1918, and the German Army was falling back. Everywhere English, French, and American soldiers were exhilarated by t ho prospects of victory. It was in the air — victory and fog.

Once upon a time, I had benefited an English flying officer named Lieutenant Bradley. He is now dead. He died in 1942, having been one of the few to whom so many were indebted. In October, 1918, Lieutenant Bradley took me in tow. We wandered about the port of Boulogne and saw the sights. One of the sights was a grain ship from South America. — a tall sailing ship with a crew partly made up of Barbados Negroes. We visited the officers on board, and the crew sang as a gesture of entertainment. One of (he songs they sang was a ribald item about a sailor who sailed into and out of a Venezuelan port, and meanwhile sailed into and out of a young lady’s arms. When I got back to my quarters that night, all I could remember was that the departing sailor had warned his sweetheart that, as time passed, other sailors would come and go, and after them, still others.

I proceeded to write some lyrics and a little music, and Lieutenant Bradley thought it was awful. According to my diary, I rewrote t he t une every day for about a week, and finally put it out of my mind. The good fortune of the entire matter is that I wrote the various versions of “Venezuela” on blank pages in my 1918 diary. In 1925, while preparing a book entitled Singing Soldiers, I used my diaries extensively for research. The notes on “Venezuela” turned up. I learned the song all over again and began to sing it to my friends.

When I offered the manuscript of Songs My Mother Never Taught Me to a New York publisher, he was aghast to discover that “Venezuela ” was not included.

“But ‘Venezuela ‘ is composition,” I said, “words and music. It is not folk music.” (I had learned to use the term by then.)

“Folk music be damned,”said be, striking the desk a resounding whack. “Yon want to sell your book, don’t you?”

Yes, I said, I did want to sell the book. Verily, I did.

“Well, then, put ‘Venezuela’ in the book. And some of those others I’ve heard you sing around town. And let me tell you another thing, young man: if you want the New York publishers to take your stuff, you’d better label it all folk music.”

“But it is all folk music,” I insisted; “all except a few items like ‘Go Way from My Window,’ ‘Venezuela,’ and —

“You can take my advice or leave il so far as your future publications are concerned,” he went on. “But as of this date in September, 1928, I will recommend that my firm publish this manuscript— ‘Bang Away, Lulu,’ ‘Aged in the Wood,’ ‘Songs My Mother Never Taught Me,’or whatever it is finally called — if you will include the items I have indicated and if you will offer t hem as soldiers’ songs and not as composition. Do you want your advance? ”

I needed my advance-my collaborators on this venture were not so impoverished as I. As I remember, the advance was about $200. I ate well for several months. “Venezuela” became “folk music.”

Since then, many a supper-club audience has wrung its collective hands over “Venezuela,” and many a record has been sold. The supper-club business profits me not a penny, and the royalties on the records have never traveled as far as my farm in Clark County, Kentucky. What I expect to discover is that some enterprising young female has rewritten the lyrics so that she and a. lot of other females can sing the song convincingly. It will take a lot of rewriting, but one should never underestimate the power or I he ability of female folk singers.

“Venezuela” was finally published in Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, and after the original publishers went out of business, the rights to the book — and apparently to “Venezuela” — were acquired by another publisher, so that I seem to have no control whatever over what might have been a rather profitable piece of composition.

Thus three of my songs have been good enough to plagiarize — and I mean plagiarize in a big way. Perhaps I do not recognize the measure of my honors. In the seventeenth century, Andrew Fletcher said: “Give me the making of the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” I do not claim to have written the nation’s songs, but I have written some songs which, duly plagiarized, have been taken to the nation’s heart. Perhaps that’s the way to do it.