6 Old American Songs

The Boatmen’s Dance

Long Time Ago

I Bought me a Cat

The Little Horses

At the River

Ching-a-Ring Chaw

Copland’s major contribution to the song repertoire is the Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson assembled over a period of six years between 1944 and 1950. Towards the end of that period - in the hope, he said, “of recharging my inspiration” - he turned to a less demanding project, which was to arrange for voice and piano a series of five 19th-century American tunes selected from a variety of traditional sources. They were first performed by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1950 and proved to be so successful on that occasion, as on their first American performance by William Warfield and Copland himself a few months later, that he had a second set ready by the middle of 1952.

Economically scored and (with the exception of the opening song of the first set) modestly presented, they are models of their kind. From the first set The Boatmen’s Dance is an expanded version of a banjo tune by Daniel Decatur Emmet, composer of Dixie. From the same set Long time ago is based on a sentimental ballad in the style of Stephen Foster and I Bought me a Cat is a witty realisation of a children’s song introduced to the composer by a friend who had learned it as a boy in Oklahoma. The Little Horses, based on a lullaby published in the Lomax collection Folk Song USA, opens the second set, which ends with At the River, a revivalist hymn which was also a favourite of Charles Ives, and another banjo tune, Ching-a-Ring Chaw, the politically incorrect words of which Copland replaced by more acceptable text of his own.