Link to the Library of Congress: Folk Songs at the North Carolina Symphony: Engaging Students with Primary Sources on Music and Gender

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In the American folk song “Married Me a Wife,” a husband pokes fun at his wife for performing household chores poorly. According to him, the milk that she churns “takes legs and walks away,” and she combs her hair “but once a week.” The song features a chorus of nonsense syllables, “Hey ge wality nikity nolity, rest of your quality, nikity nakity now now now,” to emphasize the teasing albeit annoying nature of the husband’s complaints. School-age boys once sang this folk song to girls to tease them, the musical equivalent of pulling a childhood crush’s ponytail in the schoolyard.

Students today can quickly grasp the meaning of the lyrics to “Married Me a Wife.” In a class I taught for a small group of third- through fifth-grade students, we sang and discussed the lyrics in preparation for playing the song on recorders. Joseph, a confident fifth-grade boy, scoffed at the idea of teasing a crush to get the person’s attention. He puffed up his chest to announce that if he liked someone, he would say so up front—no nonsense. But Diana, a fourth-grade girl, stated that she always teased her crushes (of whom there were quite a few, according to our after-school conversations!). She candidly admitted to the class that she teased because she was too scared to admit her true feelings.

“But what, exactly, is being made fun of in the song?” I asked the students. They understood how teasing could veil romantic feelings, but I wanted them to look more closely at the expectations that the husband narrating the song was putting on his wife. Ariel raised her hand to point out that the husband expected his wife to make herself look pretty by combing her hair and keeping the house clean by sweeping the floor. Joseph chimed back in to argue that women should not feel expected to perform such tasks. It is only okay if they like doing them themselves. A few of the third-grade girls agreed and said that some people enjoy cleaning and keeping their home tidy but that the husband and wife should help each other.

This song became the focus of a research collaboration with the North Carolina Symphony (NCS) that I facilitated using materials from the Alan Lomax CBS Radio Series Collection at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center. ¹ The NCS is currently performing an orchestral arrangement of “Married Me a Wife” titled Rissolty Rossolty: An American Fantasy for Orchestra on its 2019–2020 Education Concert program. I first came across Rissolty Rossolty when I started my dissertation research. My dissertation is an analysis of the ways that classical music and music history are represented to children in the United States. Rissolty Rossolty has since been woven through the three main approaches of my research: (1) studying historical classical music programs for children at archival libraries, including the Library of Congress; (2) studying the present-day North Carolina Symphony education programming through fieldwork and interviews with children; and (3) teaching K–8 music history classes at the Global Scholars Academy (GSA), a public charter school in Durham, North Carolina. Shortly after I found Rissolty Rossolty at the Library of Congress, I began attending NCS education outreach events and making connections with the personnel who facilitate education programming. I suggested to the education director that the NCS program the piece as part of an Education Concert, and then I started including it in music classes I taught at GSA. I was excited about the possibility of using primary source materials to open up critical conversations among elementary students about music history, culture, and gender roles.

Rissolty Rossolty also drew me in because of its orchestral arranger, Ruth Crawford Seeger. Considering her personal life and career, Crawford’s compositional choices in arranging for orchestra the song “Married Me a Wife”—a piece about gendered household labor—are particularly compelling. Many consider Crawford to be one of the most significant U.S. woman composers of the twentieth century. She became the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she used the funds from the award to create her 1931 String Quartet and other modernist compositions in the 1920s and early 1930s that earned her wide recognition. After she married folklorist Charles Seeger, she often went by Ruth Crawford Seeger, but she continued publishing her compositions primarily as Ruth Crawford. Crawford and her husband spent considerable time away from each other due to various professional obligations, writing detailed and loving letters to each other. It is clear from these letters, held in the Music Division at the Library of Congress, that as the 1930s wore on and the Great Depression took greater hold of the country, Crawford found it challenging to balance her musical career with her dedication to her family. She was raising five children, two of her own and three stepchildren, including stepson Pete Seeger, who would become a famous protest singer in the 1960s. Family and friends urged Crawford to take on more household and child care duties in support of her husband’s career. Still, she carried on her musical activities as a folk music specialist and kept composing, though less regularly. Her most notable compositions in later years were Rissolty Rossolty in 1940 and an award-winning wind quintet in 1952.

Crawford composed Rissolty Rossolty as a commission from an educational radio broadcast for school-age children. In 1936, Crawford and her family moved to Washington, D.C., where they became good friends with folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax asked Crawford to compose a piece for Folk Music of America, a children’s radio program on the CBS American School of the Air. The American School of the Air broadcast radio programs to children in classrooms across the United States about a variety of subjects, including history, science, music, and geography. It was one of several U.S.-based educational radio programs in the 1930s specifically designed for use in schools. The broadcasters had workbooks created that contained instructions to supplement radio listening with classroom activities. Folk Music of America primarily highlighted American folksongs, and its creators commissioned orchestra arrangements of the songs from composers including William Grant Still and Aaron Copland. Crawford’s Rissolty Rossolty premiered over radio on January 23, 1940, as part of a program on love songs, for which the script is available in the Library of Congress’s digital collections. The composition weaves three folk songs together: “Married Me a Wife,” in which a husband teases his wife; “Phoebe,” in which a wife teases her husband; and the fiddle tune “Callahan.” The pages from the script that include the lyrics to “Married Me a Wife” (Figure 1) are available online at https://www.loc.gov/resource/afc2004004.ms040108/?sp=108.

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Figure 1

These two documents are pages 8 and 9 of the original radio script for the Folk Music of America Love Songs episode. They show the lyrics to “Married Me a Wife,” as sung by host Alan Lomax on January 23, 1940

The piece is once again being performed for thousands of schoolchildren. The North Carolina Symphony Education Concerts reach more than 50,000 fourth- and fifth-grade students across the state of North Carolina. Most Education Concerts take place on weekdays at the NCS’s home concert hall in Raleigh, to which students travel on school buses with their teachers. Additionally, the NCS travels around the state to perform the Education Concerts in school auditoriums and gymnasiums. To deepen students’ engagement with the concerts, the NCS creates student and teacher workbooks with background information and lesson activities on the Education Concert program’s eight orchestral works. In the lesson activities, each orchestral work is paired with a different musical element. On the 2019–2020 Education Concert program, for example, John Whitney’s arrangement of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris suite pairs with the musical element tempo. The selection from Symphony no. 41 in C major (Jupiter) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart pairs with dynamics. With its overlapping folk songs passing between different instruments and tonalities, Crawford’s Rissolty Rossolty aptly illustrates the musical element texture.

In writing the workbook materials for Rissolty Rossolty, my challenge was to create lessons using primary source documents from the Library of Congress that encourage children to have critical conversations about gender roles while introducing them to the concept of texture. Activities on Rissolty Rossolty that I developed for the Global Scholars Academy’s recorder class had addressed the first two points, primary sources and gender roles. In fact, student observations and interpretation of the primary sources directly led to analyses of how song lyrics represented gender and how Crawford’s gender affected her career. In adapting lessons for the Education Concert materials’ broader audience of teachers and students, it also became clear that integrating primary sources in music class offers opportunities to collaborate with classroom teachers and meet cross-curricular goals. The NCS Education Concerts featuring Rissolty Rossolty began in September 2019 and run through May 2020. The NCS teacher workbooks include four lesson activities that sequentially build on each other. The student workbooks are smaller and more colorful, with a photograph of Crawford and biographical information.

Because Crawford composed Rissolty Rossolty for the radio broadcast Folk Music of America, whose staff also created educational workbooks, there were many ways to integrate primary sources from the original 1940 broadcast into the 2019–2020 NCS workbooks. The first NCS lesson activity, in fact, replicates the 1940 activity of a radio singalong to “Married Me a Wife” using sheet music included in the 1939–1940 American School of the Air Teacher’s Manual and Classroom Guide and the original radio recording. The students and their teacher were to have practiced the song in class before the program broadcast on the radio. ² Then, host Alan Lomax would lead them in a sing-along to the piece. Today’s NCS workbooks include pages from the original Folk Music of America workbook, which teachers can copy and distribute to their students or display using PowerPoint. Additionally, the NCS created a CD with recordings of all of the orchestral works on the Education Concert program. The 2019–2020 CD includes an additional track, an edited version of the Folk Music of America “Love Songs” program from January 23, 1940. For the radio sing-along, teachers play the radio recording of Lomax’s singalong using the NCS CD. After the singalong, students and their teacher are to discuss the lyrics of the verses, like I had with my recorder students at the GSA. Through this first activity, students learn the main folk song used in Rissolty Rossolty, contextualize the historical origins of the piece, and engage in critical discussions about the role of music in society.

The following NCS activities continue guiding teachers and students to the cumulative final activity, in which they listen to Crawford’s Rissolty Rossolty in its entirety and associate its contrasting tunes and textures with different props. The NCS teacher workbook includes a listening map with time markings that match the orchestral recording of the piece on the CD. Students prepare for this final activity by first creating contrasting musical textures using “Married Me a Wife” and then listening to additional excerpts from the original 1940 radio broadcast. The NCS workbook materials include a transposed arrangement of “Married Me a Wife” for recorders with the option of incorporating recorder performance of the tune into an activity focused on texture. A listening worksheet and answer key pair with a third activity, when students listen to the “Folk Music of America” radio broadcast excerpt describing Crawford’s Rissolty Rossolty composition. The biographical information on Crawford in the student workbook encourages students to make further connections, particularly how Crawford’s status as a woman composer impacted her personal and professional life.

Putting historical materials directly into the hands and ears of students urges them to make their own analyses of music and music history. Ruth Crawford, like most composers of marginalized identities in Western classical music culture, continues to be a composer that many music students do not learn about until they are taking university-level course work. By introducing young people to composers beyond the standard “great men” more typically represented in K–12 music history materials, music teachers can foster questions among students about which composers are represented most often and who decides on the norms of representation. Following lessons on Crawford’s Rissolty Rossolty, for example, my students and I discussed how composers of diverse identities were or were not represented on the most readily available music-classroom posters. Guiding students through interpreting materials from the past, such as educational materials from a 1940 radio program, primed them to develop their own critical lenses in understanding culture, identity, and history. With the North Carolina Symphony performing Rissolty Rossolty around the state throughout this school year, many more students and teachers will have the opportunity to engage in conversations about how gender expectations impact song lyrics and career paths. Indeed, there are many possibilities for students listening to this year’s NCS Education Concerts. They could become ardent lovers of Gershwin’s American in Paris, virtuosos in music terminology, or historians questioning who else is seen, heard, and discussed on classical music concert programs.