The American Songbag

The American Songbag was an anthology of American folksongs published by the poet Carl Sandburg in 1927. It was enormously popular and went through many editions.^[1]

According to the musicologist Judith Tick:

As a populist poet, Sandburg bestowed a powerful dignity on what the ’20s called the "American scene" in a book he called a "ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States." Reviewed widely in journals ranging from the New Masses to Modern Music, The American Songbag influenced a number of musicians. Pete Seeger, who calls it a "landmark", saw it "almost as soon as it came out." The composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife Hannah "were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged."^[2]

References

External links

• The American Songbag at Archive.org

Carl Sandburg Bibliography Notable poems "Chicago" "Fog" "Cool Tombs" "Grass" "Arithmetic" Poetry collections In Reckless Ecstasy Incidentals The Plaint of the Rose Chicago Poems Cornhuskers Smoke and Steel Slabs of the Sunburnt West Selected Poems Good Morning, America The People, Yes Song collections The American Songbag Songs of America The New American Songbag Biographies Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow Abraham Lincoln: The War Years Children's books Rootabaga Stories Rootabaga Pigeons Abe Lincoln Grows Up Early Moon Potato Face Prairie-Town Boy Wind Song Novels Remembrance Rock Essays and criticism The Family of Man introduction Carl Sandburg at the Movies Stage productions Carl Sandburg Tribute (UCLA, 1958) The World of Carl Sandburg Recordings Rootabaga Stories Lincoln Portrait Carl Sandburg Reading Fog and other Poems Related Birthplace, boyhood home, gravesite Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site Manuscripts and personal papers Carl Sandburg College Edward Steichen (brother-in-law) Commons Wikibooks Wikiquote Wikisource texts