(From the Sloane MSS. Quoted from _The Study of Folk Songs_, by Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco). AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC We come now to a question that has been the subject of many arguments and debates. Many claim that we have no folk music in the United States, and others claim that we have. It would take a whole volume to present both sides and we must reduce it to a sugar-coated capsule. Although we know that Stephen Foster wrote _Old Folks at Home_, _The Old Kentucky Home_, _Uncle Ned_, _Massa’s in the Cold_, _Cold Ground_, and _Old Black Joe_, they express so perfectly the mood and spirit of the people that they are true folk songs. Harold Vincent Milligan in his book on Stephen Foster says: “Every folk-song is first born in the heart and brain of some one person, whose spirit is so finely attuned to the voice of that inward struggle which is the history of the soul of man, that when he seeks for his own self-expression he at the same time gives a voice to that vast ‘mute multitude who die and give no sign.’” And again speaking of Stephen Foster, Mr. Milligan says: “Although purists may question their right to the title ‘folk songs’ his melodies are truly the songs of the American people.” The folk music of which we have told you has been the music portraits of different peoples such as the Russian, the Polish, the French, the German, the English, the Irish and so on. If there has been a mixture of peoples or tribes as in England where there were Britons, Danes, Angles, Saxons and Normans, it happened so long ago that they have become molded into one race. We are all Americans but we are not of one race, and we are still in the process of being molded into one type. We unite people of all nations under one flag and one government, but we have been sung to sleep and amused as children by the folk songs of the European nations to which our parents and grandparents belonged! And so we have heard from childhood _Sur le Pont d’Avignon_, _Schlaf Kindlein Schlaf_, _Wurmland_, _The Volga Boat Song_, _Sally in our Alley_, or _The Wearing of the Green_, none of which is American. In spite of all these obstacles to the growth of a folk music in America, we have several sources from which they have come. As our earliest settlers in Virginia and New England were English, they brought with them many of their folk songs and some of these have remained unchanged in the districts where people of other nations have not penetrated. _The Lonesome Tunes_ of the Kentucky mountains, also of Tennessee, the Carolinas and Vermont are examples of this kind of English folk song in America. In Louisiana which was settled by the French, we find a type of folk song that is very charming. It is a combination of old French folk song with negro spiritual, and is brought to us by the Creoles.