Elizabeth Anne Salt

This is a music book that could really use a little more science. As in, it's lacking in documentation and data.

The basic idea is a good one, which has been used by others: Tell the history of a state through folk songs. The book is clearly designed for school use, and is written at a simple enough level to supply useful classroom texts. It also includes both guitar chords and mountain (Appalachian) dulcimer note charts for the songs -- the former obviously useful, the latter perhaps not so useful now, but the mountain dulcimer was experiencing something of a revival at the time this book was published. There are also some interesting illustrations. You couldn't teach an Ohio history class using this book, but it could be a useful supplement to a real textbook.

But the lack of documentation hurts in several ways. If you want to get more detail on a particular topic, the references aren't there, limiting its value. And the song sources aren't listed. Or, rather, they are given, but in a way that isn't very helpful. For the traditional songs, taken from field collections, there is no information on the source (e.g. several are certainly taken from Mary O. Eddy's Ballads and Song from Ohio, but we aren't told which ones). For songs taken from traveling music troupes, there is no way to find out more about the troupe involved. And for the modern songs, there is no copyright information. Case in point: There are several songs from the Ohio canal-boat captain Pearl R. Nye. Nye knew many genuine folk songs, but he wrote his own canal songs, and those are the ones Ms. Salt uses. And Nye lived until 1950, so those songs would still have been under copyright when this book was published; they're only going into the public domain now. Could they be sung in a school classroom? I have no idea, and no teacher would be likely to know either. So a teacher who truly wanted to use this book would have a lot more research to do. And I doubt many teachers would want to do all that work. Which is perhaps why, as of when I write this review, only two LibraryThing members own the book....… (meer)