Life, love and literature

When the European immigrants began in earnest to come to America for what they believed would be better lives, it must have been so difficult to leave the places of their birth! They brought their culture and what comforts they could to help them remember home. One of the most valuable assets they brought to share with America didn’t have to be packed and guarded like the family silver or what few treasures they could carry! It was the old ballads, one of the earliest forms of literature. They had been handed down by word of mouth long before they were printed in the British literature anthologies that appear in American classrooms all over the USA! My mother was part of the generation that helped continue this handing down of these traditional ballads. By the time I was in the 7th grade, I had my own storehouse of songs I could sing to anyone who cared to listen. My 7th grade music teacher was an avid collector of folk ballads. She told us that she spent her summers visiting places like Appalachia to interview and collect as many of these songs as she could before they were lost. I don’t exactly know how she recorded them. She discovered that I knew many of them, so she would ask me to sing them for my classmates. BARBARA ALLEN was one that I remember singing. It probably had at least 20 stanzas – at least in the version I had learned from my mother. When I think back over that year, I am impressed at the way my classmates could listen politely to me sing. Maybe it was because of their respect for our teacher. In later years, it seemed that BARBARA ALLEN was in every anthology. I would often sing this to my classes; the textbook versions were never as long as what my mother sang. Some of my teacher friends would ask me to sing it to their classes when they studied ballads! When I went on tour to England and Scotland, our tour guide played a tape of English and Scottish ballads. When I got home, I started investigating ballads from Scotland. I had no idea of the treasure trove there. I found CD’s by a group called The Corries! When they sang “Will ye go, Lassie Go?“, tears were streaming down my face. It spoke to my soul! I have since discovered that I am 33 percent Scottish – plus a little DNA from England and Wales. I consider myself very fortunate to have a mother who sang to me, told me stories, and in so doing fostered an everlasting love of music and literature!