Chapter 44 - Page 2

Charlie?" "When Jamie Come Hame," "Over
the Water to Charlie," "Charlie is my Darling," "The Bonny Blue Bonnets
are Over the Border," "Saddle Your Steeds and Awa," and a myriad others
whose infinite tenderness and melody no modern composer can equal.

Yet these same Scotch and Irish, the same Jacobite English, transplanted
on account of their chronic rebelliousness to the mountains of Virginia,
the Carolinas, and Georgia, seem to have lost their tunefulness, as some
fine singing birds do when carried from their native shores.

The descendants of those who drew swords for James and Charles at Preston
Pans and Culloden dwell to-day in the dales and valleys of the
Alleganies, as their fathers did in the dales and valleys of the
Grampians, but their voices are mute.

As a rule the Southerners are fond of music. They are fond of singing
and listening to old-fashioned ballads, most of which have never been
printed, but handed down from one generation to the other, like the
'Volklieder' of Germany. They sing these with the wild, fervid
impressiveness characteristic of the ballad singing of unlettered people.
Very many play tolerably on the violin and banjo, and occasionally one is
found whose instrumentation may be called good. But above this hight
they never soar. The only musician produced by the South of whom the
rest of the country has ever heard, is Blind Tom, the negro idiot. No
composer, no song writer of any kind has appeared within the borders of
Dixie.

It was a disappointment to me that even the stress of the war, the
passion and fierceness with which the Rebels felt and fought, could not
stimulate any adherent of the Stars and Bars into the production of a
single lyric worthy in the remotest degree of the magnitude of the
struggle, and the depth of the popular feeling. Where two million
Scotch, fighting to restore the fallen fortunes of the worse than
worthless Stuarts, filled the world with immortal music, eleven million
of Southerners, fighting for what they claimed to be individual freedom
and national life, did not produce any original verse, or a bar of music
that the world could recognize as such. This is the fact; and an
undeniable one. Its explanation I must leave to abler analysts
than I am.

Searching for peculiar causes we find but two that make the South differ
from the ancestral home of these people. These two were Climate and
Slavery. Climatic effects will not account for the phenomenon, because
we see that the peasantry of the mountains of Spain and the South of
France as ignorant as these people, and dwellers in a still more
enervating atmosphere-are very fertile in musical composition, and their
songs are to the Romanic