Listen to the Mockingbird: American Folksongs and Popular Music Lyrics of the 19th Century

In this important new collection, editor Douglas Messerli has collected 78 lyrics of American folksongs and popular music from the 19th century. Some of these songs, particularly the African-American spirituals, the chanteys, and the cowboy songs, are beautiful paeans to the American way of living. But the vast majority, especially the minstrel songs and the Civil War ballads, are often perverse in their racial humor and sexual undertones. These lyrics reveal that some of jour favorite American song classics are highly representative of the wild and open wilderness-both energizing and more than a little frightening-of the American landscape. From the patriotically conceived "America" of 1832 to the rebelliously insistent "I'll Marry the Man I love" of 1897, the songs in this volume reveal the vast range of the American people and their ways of living.