For this assignment, I chose two musical terms: “boogaloo” and “folk music.” The reason I wanted to look up “boogaloo” was because I had never heard it before, and wanted to find out more about it. I’m not quite sure why I chose “folk music;” perhaps because I’m still curious about how this evolved from its earliest days. It’s always fun to go back into the past. My mother is big on genealogy, and I’ve occasionally worked with her on it over the years, so I’ve encountered very old sources of information, and they never fail to fascinate me. The language is the same but also quite different in some ways, mainly in word choice. The search can be almost as fun as the find, and that’s what I felt about this assignment.

Sources

Google NGRAM Viewer – I really like this feature and am so glad to know about it now. The graph is so helpful in getting an overall picture of the timeframe and patterns of usage.

Google Books – The advanced search feature with the date ranges is especially useful when trying to find the earliest references of a topic. This is not a place for getting a lot of free information, but it at least gives good book sources if that is what you are looking for.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers – This was fun. There is something about old newspaper articles that brings a subject to life. The date range feature is so useful. The only downside is that the optical reader is not always accurate, but you can still get many good returns on a search.

Chronicling America at Library of Congress – I’m so disappointed. I tried and tried to access this site, but always got this message: “Chronicling America has encountered an unexpected error while processing your request. The details of this error have been logged, and our troubleshooting specialists will be notified. We apologize for any inconvenience.” In lieu of this source, I used “America’s Historical Newspapers” database, which I accessed through the GMU Library System.

Boogaloo

As I mentioned before, I had never heard of this term! It seems to have multiple meanings. I found references to a type of dance that was big in the 1960’s, and also references in which the term seems to be synonymous with “soul” music. In the Google NGRAM Viewer, there were a few references in the 1940’s, but I couldn’t find any indication of what that was about. The references were between 1939 and 1945, which makes me wonder if there was some slang use of the term during WWII? The references to the dance or soul music started in the late 1950’s, spiked upward during the 1960’s, then dipped back down in the 1970’s. Then in the 1990’s it went back up to the 1970 level, and there was a huge spike in the late 1990’s. I couldn’t tell from this source which of the “hits” on the graph was referencing the dance and which was referencing soul music.

In the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database, the earliest reference I found was a Top 10 Record List from May 22, 1965. The song “Boo-Ga-Loo” by Tom and Jerrio was number six on the list. I listened to it on YouTube, and it was a nice, upbeat, fun song. I thought it maybe had a displaced beat (1 2 AND 3 4), but the next newspaper article that I found – a Chicago Tribune article from February 26, 1967 –  mentioned that the Boogaloo dance can be done to any “one-two-three rock beat.” The article is entitled “Boogaloo is now!” and it describes the dance craze that seemed to hit the United States during that year. According to the article, “no one can agree on where or how it happened,” although “it’s definitely got a Latin flavor.”

There wasn’t much I could find in Google Books, although there is a book from 2005 called Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music, by Arthur Kempton. In this case, the word “boogaloo” is being used to reference soul music, so at some point the two terms became synonymous. Although the title mentions “American” popular music, the description of the book calls it a book “on the art, influence, and commerce of Black American popular music,” and Publisher’s Weekly described it as “a grand and sweeping survey of the history of soul music in America.” So the title can really be translated to say Soul Music:  The Quintessence of Black American Popular Music.

I had many hits through the America’s Historical Newspapers database, most of which were from 1968 into the mid 1970’s. Many were casual references to the Boogaloo dance and the teenage craze for it, and gave the distinct impression that there were many annoyed parents out there who were sick of hearing about it and seeing their teens performing it. There were also a number of references to a movie made in the 1980’s called “Breakin’ 2 Electric Boogaloo,” which did not seem to get any good reviews.

Folk Music (or Folk Songs)

This is a very broad category, and it’s hard to tell exactly when the references started. According to Google NGRAM Viewer, a few references showed up in the early and mid-1800’s, but these turned out to be false hits (perhaps a problem with the optical reader?). The main references started in the 1880’s, with a big upsurge until the mid-1940’s. Then there was a slight drop, another spike in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s, a slight drop, another spike in the 1970’s, a slight drop, then a relatively steady line from the 1980’s through the 1990’s. After reading Miller’s book, Segregating Sound, I can understand what would cause the upsurge in the early decades of the 1900’s, which was when the American Folklore Society was established and there was great interest in gathering folk songs from around the country. I’m not sure what caused the later drops and spikes, except for maybe the usual pattern of something going in and out of favor in society.

I found some very interesting items in Google books. There were a number of books on Folk Songs from other nations, which I briefly skimmed through. One in particular had a definition of the folk song that caught my attention and emphasized how different the world was back then. The following quote is from The History of Music, from the Christian Era to the Present Time, written by Frederic Louis Ritter (O. Ditson & Company, 1883):

“The folk-song is an outgrowth from the life of the people. It is a direct naturalistic efflux of popular lyric song; unassisted by art, it is true, but yet the product of innate artistic instinct in the people, seeking a more lofty expression than that of every-day speech for those feelings which are awakened in the soul by the varied events of life. The first authors of the folk-song are, with very few exceptions, unknown: they were either men or women of the people, who with unembarrassed simplicity, and unaware of the laws of art, described with free originality that which lived and moved in the soul of the people…On one side purely human feeling, on the other side national character, are truthfully reflected in the folk-song; in it the characteristics of a nation are so faithfully displayed that it not only betrays its origin, but also enables us to judge, through its distinguishing features, of the relationship existing between different races of men.”

Ritter describes a folk song as one in which human emotion and national character are “truthfully reflected,” which I think is a very nice way to put it. I found it interesting that he mentions how folk songs enable us to “judge…the relationship…between different races of men.” Would this be an example of the Racial Nationalism point of view?

The 1895 Pamphlets Relating to Performances of Popular, National, and Folk Music in Minnesota was an early reference to American folk music. Unfortunately, there was no further information on this volume, but this would seem to be a common type of pamphlet from back then. Another book that showed up was the 1907 Folk Songs of the American Negro, written by Frederick Work (another person from Miller’s book).  The 1914 book Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music, written by Henry Edward Krehbiel, was “written with the purpose of bringing a species of folksong into the field of scientific observation and presenting it as fit material for artistic treatment.” This sounds so much like the mindset of the American Folklore Society, as described in Miller’s book. Although it sounds like a condescending attitude towards African Americans, at least there was recognition of the importance of documenting the music. Yet another of Miller’s references came up in the Google Books search – Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk-songs. It was a strange feeling to encounter all these “acquaintances” from the past!

The ProQuest Historical Newspapers database came up with a number of articles, two of which I will mention here. The July 5, 1893 edition of the Chicago Tribune had an article describing the Women’s Musical Congress, with the day’s program including “Indian and Folk Song Music” as well as an address on “Folk Song in America.” The March 16, 1895 issue of the Boston Daily Globe contained an article on “Folk Songs of the Negroes,” during which “Capt R. R. Molen Explains to the Folk Lore Society the Origin and Nature of the Melodies.” The descriptions that these old articles give of the people seem so unusual now, such as “five negro students and a handsome young Winnebago Indian.” This article contained many quotes that I’d like to include here, but I’ll keep it minimal. It is clear that they are showing respect for the folk songs of Negroes, but at the same time the condescending tone comes through loud and clear: “It is a true body of folk songs, the outgrowth of the conditions that surrounded in the past an oppressed and humble, but highly-emotional race, who expressed all emotions whether of joy or sorrow, of love or anger, naturally and spontaneously through the medium of rhythmic and musical sounds.” The article pointed out that some of the music was not really folk music but “is in some cases an imitation by white ‘nigger minstrels’ of some of the wilder or more ridiculous of the shouts or religious songs of the negroes…” Wow. It’s one thing reading Miller’s comprehensive book on these ideas, but reading newspaper articles of the real happenings is like a slap in the face. It’s so strange to go back to these older times when people thought so differently, and to try to understand why they thought that way.

America’s Historical Newspapers database had thousands of articles with references to folk music or folk songs, with 1869 being the earliest. The articles I looked at were about musical programs or lectures that included folk songs. One that caught my eye described a lecture by a “Mr. Elson” on “National Music” in the Macon Telegraph (Macon, Georgia) on March 23, 1887. This brought to mind our discussion in class on the United States searching for its national identity. Mr. Elson points out that “although all folksong comes under the bead of national music, the world has come to consider such music essentially national which awakens patriotic feelings…our own land, which possesses liberty in the highest degree, has the least national music worthy of comment…we find that our national music is not as powerful as that of older nations, and that much of it is really not our own.” This is quite a look into how the nation felt back in the late 1800’s as the United States was still struggling with its identity. This was an important backdrop to life at that time, although our national identity is something people now tend to take for granted. (Although with our current election nightmare I wonder if our national identity is going through a crisis. I won’t say anything more about that!)

The four sources I was able to use for this assignment provided me with very useful and different views of information sources – the graph from Google NGRAM Viewer, the daily slice of life in the newspaper articles, and entire books devoted to the subjects. For me, the most powerful of all are the newspaper articles, not only for the information they contain but mainly because of their depiction of real life. The people feel so real, and there is such an acute sense of being in that time. All in all, this was a fascinating step back into the past, which is so often like stepping into a whole different world! It is so important to do this, and try to understand the context in which something evolved, and why people thought the way they did. Many times we tend to judge things based on our current modern mindset, which gives a distorted view.