Eric Hermann 1 The Wagoner’s Lad: An American Folk-Operetta Introduction The folksinger Buell Kazee (1900–1976) is perhaps best-known for his work during the late 1920s, when he recorded fifty-two songs for Brunswick’s “Songs From Dixie” hillbilly music series. During the urban Folk Revival of the 1960s and ‘70s, he earned recognition once again for his performances at the Newport Folk Festival and at college campuses around the country. Another area of Kazee’s involvement in folk music, however, has largely been overlooked: his work as a songwriter and composer. In the 1920s, Kazee wrote and recorded several songs modeled on folksong genres, including the bluesy work song, “Steel A-Going Down,” and the romantic western ballad, “The Cowboy’s Trail.” More significantly, in the 1930s and ‘40s, he composed two large-scale, dramatic works based on Appalachian folk music: The White Pilgrim, a “folk-cantata” co-written with Morehead College music professor Lewis Henry Horton and published in 1940 (with a foreword by shape-note scholar George Pullen Jackson); and The Wagoner’s Lad, an unpublished “folk-operetta.” 1 The following paper offers an examination of the latter work, focusing on its libretto, music, and significance to Kazee’s folk music career. Kazee initially sketched The Wagoner’s Lad in the late 1940s, but set it aside for several decades; although he returned to the work at the end of his life, he never had it published. The story, a semi-autobiographical tale about Appalachian life in the early twentieth century, is based 1 Lewis Henry Horton and Buell Kazee, The White Pilgrim, A Folk-Cantata for Chorus of Mixed Voices and Soli with Accompaniment for Strings and Piano (New York: H. W. Gray, 1940). A copy of the libretto to The Wagoner’s Lad can be found at the Southern Folklife Collection at The University of North Carolina in the Archie Green Collection.
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Transcript
Eric Hermann
1
The Wagoner’s Lad:
An American Folk-Operetta
Introduction
The folksinger Buell Kazee (1900–1976) is perhaps best-known for his work during the
late 1920s, when he recorded fifty-two songs for Brunswick’s “Songs From Dixie” hillbilly
music series. During the urban Folk Revival of the 1960s and ‘70s, he earned recognition once
again for his performances at the Newport Folk Festival and at college campuses around the
country. Another area of Kazee’s involvement in folk music, however, has largely been
overlooked: his work as a songwriter and composer. In the 1920s, Kazee wrote and recorded
several songs modeled on folksong genres, including the bluesy work song, “Steel A-Going
Down,” and the romantic western ballad, “The Cowboy’s Trail.” More significantly, in the 1930s
and ‘40s, he composed two large-scale, dramatic works based on Appalachian folk music: The
White Pilgrim, a “folk-cantata” co-written with Morehead College music professor Lewis Henry
Horton and published in 1940 (with a foreword by shape-note scholar George Pullen Jackson);
and The Wagoner’s Lad, an unpublished “folk-operetta.”1 The following paper offers an
examination of the latter work, focusing on its libretto, music, and significance to Kazee’s folk
music career.
Kazee initially sketched The Wagoner’s Lad in the late 1940s, but set it aside for several
decades; although he returned to the work at the end of his life, he never had it published. The
story, a semi-autobiographical tale about Appalachian life in the early twentieth century, is based
1 Lewis Henry Horton and Buell Kazee, The White Pilgrim, A Folk-Cantata for Chorus of
Mixed Voices and Soli with Accompaniment for Strings and Piano (New York: H. W. Gray,
1940). A copy of the libretto to The Wagoner’s Lad can be found at the Southern Folklife
Collection at The University of North Carolina in the Archie Green Collection.
Eric Hermann
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on one of Kazee’s best-known songs, “The Wagoner’s Lad,” which he recorded for Brunswick in
1928.2 The libretto, with its idyllic mountain setting, quaint characters, Appalachian dialect, and
allusions to Kazee’s childhood, paints a nostalgic and sometimes comic portrait of life in the
mountains of eastern Kentucky. Like Kazee’s earlier large-scale composition, The White Pilgrim,
this work presents folk music in the context of an art-music genre. While the structure of the
piece resembles an operetta (or a musical comedy), the music consists entirely of Appalachian
folk songs. In writing The Wagoner’s Lad, Kazee brought to fulfillment his conception of folk
music as a literary art form, and one that is ideally suited to dramatic representation.
The Influence of Georgetown College
Ultimately, the roots of The Wagoner’s Lad can be traced to Kazee’s childhood in Burton
Fork, KY, where he learned, first-hand, the ballads, dances, and play-party songs of southern
Appalachia. More directly, however, the work grew out of his experiences at Georgetown
College, a small university located in the flatlands of central Kentucky, which he attended from
1921 to 1924. At Georgetown, Kazee received a broad, liberal arts education, taking courses in
English, ancient languages, and literature. He also studied music theory, piano, and classical
voice. Under the tutelage of his voice teacher, C. Frederick Bonawitz, an opera singer who also
directed the Georgetown College Glee Club, he developed a passion for classical music and
opera. During these years, he witnessed “all the greats in concert at Lexington—John
McCormick, France`s Alda, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Albert Spalding, Schumann-Heink,
2 Kazee’s 1928 recording of “The Wagoner’s Lad (Loving Nancy)” (Brunswick 213) was
widely known, having been reissued on Harry Smith’s LP compilation, Anthology of American
Folk Music (1952). Joan Baez and Doc Watson, among others, recorded their own versions
based on his original.
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Kreisler, Grainger and many others.”3 Kazee also involved himself in a wide range of
extracurricular musical and literary activities. According to his transcript, he was Editor of “The
Quarterly” (1925), President of the Scribblers’ Club (1925), a member of the Glee Club (1921-
25) and the Choral Club, and a participant in various social and church-related activities.4 By
graduation, Buell had earned a strong reputation among his peers for his musical and intellectual
talents, as evidenced by the caption next to his yearbook photo, which read: “The silver-throated
songster of our class; a gifted writer of verse and a literary man of more than passing excellence.
A man solid in his attainments, idealistic, high-minded, and true.”5 (figure 1)
Figure 1. Kazee’s 1925 Georgetown College yearbook photo.
During his college years, Kazee also began, for the first time, to study folk music in an
academic context. After initially leaving his banjo at home, due partly to his embarrassment over
its hillbilly associations (it was “too ‘hillbilly’ for modern culture”), he soon experienced a
change of heart. As he studied English and Scottish ballads he realized that much of the peculiar,
3 Buell Kazee, “Letters to the Editor,” JEMF Quarterly 6, part II, no. 18 (Summer 1970):
49.
4 Buell Kazee Transcript, Georgetown University, 1921–25. Accessed at Georgetown
College archives.
5 Quote from 1925 Belle of the Blue, Georgetown’s senior yearbook.
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old-fashioned language of the ballads had been preserved in the dialect of his native Eastern
Kentucky, leading him to conclude that, ”we were literature living.”6 Instilled with a greater
appreciation for his musical and cultural heritage, he returned to campus sophomore year with
his banjo and began to give folk music concerts. He concentrated on the ballad literature, honing
his abilities as a storyteller and refining his banjo accompaniment, which developed into a subtle
narrative tool. He learned to effectively arrange ballad texts by studying the major folk music
songbooks of the period, a fact confirmed through a close comparison of the songbooks with
Kazee’s commercial recordings from a few years later. The most influential book was perhaps
Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs (1920), a collection compiled by the classically-trained
performers Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway; arguably, this book, more than any other,
provided Kazee with a model for how to effectively arrange folk music, both textually and
musically.7 He borrowed texts and melodies from this book, as well as from Josephine McGill’s
Folk-songs of the Kentucky Mountains (1917) and John Harrington Cox’s Folk-songs of the