American Ballads was issued by Folkways Records in 1957 as FA 2319. Pete Seeger sings and plays five-string banjo, and Moses Asch recorded it. The fourteen ballads are “Pretty Polly,” “The Three Butchers” (titled “Johnson” on the liner notes), “John Henry,” “Jay Gould’s Daughter,” “The Titanic Disaster,” “Lady Margaret” (Fair Margaret and Sweet William), and “John Hardy” on the first side, and “The Golden Vanity,” “Gypsy Davy,” “The Farmer’s Curst Wife,” “In Castyle There Lived a Lady” (“Down in Carlisle”), “St. James Hospital,” “Jesse James” and “Barbara Allen” on the second.
The liner notes are Seeger’s own. They open with the idea that a ballad’s purpose is to carry the news, with the singer’s and audience’s feelings coloring the story, and he mentions the Catskills ballad singer George Edwards. Several songs come with a stated source. He learned “Lady Margaret” in 1935 from Bascom Lunsford, the North Carolina lawyer and banjo player. His “Golden Vanity” was learned from a Carter Family recording, and the melody of “Gypsy Davy” from a man in upstate New York who worked at the American Locomotive plant in Schenectady and said his mother had taught it to him. “In Castyle There Lived a Lady” follows a Library of Congress field recording by Clay Walters of Salyersville, Kentucky, and “St. James Hospital” the version John Lomax recorded in Texas from James Baker in 1934. For “John Hardy” he points to the 1894 trial and execution of a John Hardy in West Virginia, and he places “John Henry” in the context of the 1870s Swannanoa tunnel and the steam drill. “Fair Margaret and Sweet William,” “Gypsy Davy,” “The Farmer’s Curst Wife” and “Barbara Allen” are identified as Child ballads.
Tracklist
- 1 Peg and Awl 2:30
- 2 The Blind Fiddler 1:17
- 3 Buffalo Skinners alt version 5:15
- 4 Eight-Hour Day 1:01
- 5 Hard Times in the Mill 2:16
- 6 Roll Down the Line 3:16
- 7 A Hayseed like Me 1:17
- 8 The Farmer is the Man (Who Feeds Them All) 1:43
- 9 Come All You Hardy Miners 2:01
- 10 He Lies in the American Land 2:01
- 11 Casey Jones alt version 3:07
- 12 Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine 3:42
- 13 Cotton Mill Colic 1:41
- 14 Seven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat 1:59
- 15 Mill Mother's Lament 1:38
- 16 Fare Ye Well, Old Ely Branch 2:12
- 17 Beans, Bacon, and Gravy 2:56
- 18 The Death of Harry Simms 2:14
- 19 Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues 1:10
- 20 The Ballad of Barney Graham 1:49
- 21 My Children are Seven in Number 4:00
- 22 Raggedy 2:32
- 23 Pittsburgh Town 1:31
- 24 Sixty Percent 1:01
- 25 The Big Rock Candy Mountain alt version
- 26 The Golden Vanity alt version
