The Sounding Joy: A Refreshing Timeless Christmas Album

Elizabeth Mitchell

The Sounding Joy: Christmas Songs In and Out of the Ruth Crawford Seeger Songbook provides a wonderful alternative to the glossy over-used Christmas songs we hear every year. On the 2013 album, Elizabeth Mitchell, with a little help from her friends, provides a refreshing break from the commercialization of the holiday with songs taken from a songbook created by Ruth Crawford Seeger.

The songbook was published in 1953 and used in schoolhouses around the country before it was taken out of circulation. As part of the WPA Federal Music Project during the Great Depression, Seeger worked to help preserve old folk songs. She often worked with her family members as well as John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Bess Lomax Hawes. Ruth Seeger also worked as a composer in her own right.  And she used her skills in arranging the songs in her songbooks.

The Songbook

Seeger arranged her songbooks for families to sing the folk songs in their living rooms. As she wrote, “These songs grew out of and were used in the old-time American Christmas, a Christmas not of Santa Claus and tinseled trees but of homespun worship and festivity.” Her 1953 songbook, American Folk Songs for Christmas, followed two songbooks she created of folk songs for children.

Ruth Seeger died of cancer the year her Christmas songbook was published. But her children Mike, Peggy, Penny, and stepson Pete Seeger helped continue the American folk revival she helped start. Peggy Seeger is one of the friends who joins Elizabeth Mitchell on two of the carols on the CD.

There are a few songs you will recognize, like a version of “Joy to the World” with lovely banjo and vocal harmonies.  But most of the songs will be new to the casual listener. Some are more religious than many songs usually played today. Yet others capture other aspects of the holiday season like the Winter solstice.

As Mitchell writes in her liner notes for the album, “Through her song choices, Ruth Crawford Singer shined a light on a distinctly American Christmas tradion that might be unrecognizable to us today.”

The Album

Mitchell adds her own touch to the songs.  But she also keeps the simplicity of the folk songs that reflect certain regions and times in America. The album also features other friends largely from around her community in Woodstock, New York.  Other performers include Natalie Merchant, Aoife O’Donovan, Amy Helm, John Sebastian, Dan Zanes, and Happy Traum.

One of my favorites on the album is “Singing in the Land.” The song features vocals by Mitchell, Merchant, Traum, Sebastian, Ruth Unger, Daniel LIttleton, Michael Merenda, and Lyn Hardy.

The album also features photos and wonderful liner notes.  The notes include essays by each of Natalie Merchant, Daniel Littleton, and Elizabeth Mitchell. Additionally, Mitchell wrote comments for each song on the album.

If you are looking for some holiday music that warms your heart and seems significantly removed from the commercialization of Christmas, check out this album. The Sounding Joy: Christmas Songs In and Out of the Ruth Crawford Seeger Songbook by Elizabeth Mitchell and Friends is available from Smithsonian Folkways.

Information in post comes from the liner notes to The Sounding Joy. What is your favorite lesser-known Christmas album? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Elizabeth Cotten: “Freight Train”

    Cotten Freight Train Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten was born on January 5, 1895 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, although some sources list the year of her birth as 1893. Cotten began playing the banjo at the age of eight and soon thereafter turned to the guitar and at the age of twelve wrote “Freight Train,” a timeless folk song that would eventually stand beside other classics in the canon of great train songs.

    Early Life, Discovery, and “Freight Train”

    As a young woman, Cotten put aside any hopes of being a musician for marriage, motherhood, and work. But after a divorce in 1940 led her to Washington, D.C., Cotten’s work in a department store led her to be discovered by the world, according to Nigel Williamson’s The Rough Guide to the Blues.

    While working in Landsburgh’s Department Store around the mid-1940s, Cotten found a lost girl and helped reunite the girl with her mother. The mother turned out to be Ruth Crawford Seeger, and the little girl was Peggy Seeger, who was the sister of Pete Seeger. The chance encounter led Cotten to working in the Seeger household, where the family’s interest in music rekindled Cotten’s own musical talents.

    Eventually, Peggy’s brother Mike Seeger produced Cotten and her unique finger-picking guitar playing for an album with Folkways, Folksongs And Instrumentals With Guitar (1958). The album included the song about death that Cotten wrote as a 12-year-old, “Freight Train”: “When I die, oh bury me deep / Down at the end of old Chestnut Street, / So I can hear old Number Nine / As she comes rolling by.”

    Music Career

    Audiences came to love Cotten’s performances at folk festivals, where she would tell stories about her life and perform songs with her distinctive guitar playing. As her friend and musician Dana Klipp would later explain, “It wasn’t just her music; it was her entire personality and her spirituality. It was a very gentle and graceful spirituality.”

    Still, she kept her day job of doing domestic work until 1970. She made additional recordings, and the album Elizabeth Cotton, Live won a Grammy award in 1984 when Cotten was 89.

    Later Life and Death

    Cotten spent the last years of her life in Syracuse, New York, which in 1983 named a small park “The Elizabeth Cotten Grove” in her honor. But Cotten still continued to perform in her later years. Cotten’s last performances occurred at the 1986 Philidelphia Folk Festival and at a New York City performance arranged for her by Odetta in 1987.

    Cotten passed away on June 29, 1987, and although in “Freight Train” she asked to be buried “Down at the end of old Chestnut Street,” her body was cremated.

    Cotton’s music and spirit, however, live on. Cotten left behind a lot of fans, while others are still discovering her today. Below is one of her late interviews, when she was interviewed by Aly Bain for his 1985 series Down Home.

    Cotten’s songs have been covered by many performers, including Jerry Garcia and Peter, Paul and Mary. Another of her many honors is that she was included in Brian Lanker’s book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.

    What is your favorite performance by Elizabeth Cotten? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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