In 2015, Bob Dylan said, "I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them, back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing ...but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that's fair game, that everything belongs to everyone." InHear My
Sad Story, Richard Polenberg describes the historical events that led to the writing of many famous American folk songs that served as touchstones for generations of American musicians, lyricists, and folklorists.
Those events, which took place from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, often involved tragic occurrences: murders, sometimes resulting from love affairs gone wrong; desperate acts borne out of poverty and unbearable working conditions; and calamities such as railroad crashes, shipwrecks, and natural disasters. All of Polenberg's account of the songs in the book are grounded in historical fact and illuminate the social history of the times. Reading these tales of sorrow, misfortune, and regret puts us in touch with the dark but terribly familiar side of American history.
On Christmas 1895 in St. Louis, an African American man named Lee Shelton, whose nickname was "Stack Lee," shot and killed William Lyons in a dispute over seventy-five cents and a hat. Shelton was sent to prison until 1911, committed another murder upon his release, and died in a prison hospital in 1912. Even during his lifetime, songs were being written about Shelton, and eventually 450 versions of his story would be recorded. As the song-you may know Shelton as Stagolee or Stagger Lee-was shared and adapted, the emotions of the time were preserved, but the fact that the songs described real people, real lives, often fell by the wayside. Polenberg returns us to the men and women who, in song, became legends. The lyrics serve as valuable historical sources, providing important information about what had happened, why, and what it all meant. More important, they reflect the character of American life and the pathos elicited by the musical memory of these common and troubled lives.
During the Cold War, both Chinese and American officials employed a wide range of migration policies and practices to pursue legitimacy, security, and prestige. They focused on allowing or ...restricting immigration, assigning refugee status, facilitating student exchanges, and enforcing deportations.The Diplomacy of Migrationfocuses on the role these practices played in the relationship between the United States and the Republic of China both before and after the move to Taiwan. Meredith Oyen identifies three patterns of migration diplomacy: migration legislation as a tool to achieve foreign policy goals, migrants as subjects of diplomacy and propaganda, and migration controls that shaped the Chinese American community.
Using sources from diplomatic and governmental archives in the United States, the Republic of China on Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, and the United Kingdom, Oyen applies a truly transnational perspective.The Diplomacy of Migrationcombines important innovations in the field of diplomatic history with new international trends in migration history to show that even though migration issues were often considered "low stakes" or "low risk" by foreign policy professionals concerned with Cold War politics and the nuclear age, they were neither "no risk" nor unimportant to larger goals. Instead, migration diplomacy became a means of facilitating other foreign policy priorities, even when doing so came at great cost for migrants themselves.
PROLOGUE Polenberg, Richard
Hear My Sad Story,
10/2015
Book Chapter
In the winter of 1875–1876, a young man named Francis Henry (Frank) Maynard, only twenty-one years of age, was working as a cowboy near Medicine Lodge, a tiny village in southern Kansas. While he was ...there he heard some ranch hands singing a song called “The Dying Girl’s Lament.” So Maynard used a tune from an old Irish ballad, “The Bard of Armagh,” modified the lyrics of yet another Irish song, “The Unfortunate Rake,” did considerable rewriting, and came up with a song called “The Dying Cowboy.” In his original version, the first line was “As I rode down
EPILOGUE Polenberg, Richard
Hear My Sad Story,
10/2015
Book Chapter
In the early 1920s, Frank Maynard, now in his seventies, continued to make his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Over the years, he had joined the Pikes Peak Chapter of the Modern Woodmen of ...America, and had invested in a speculative gold-mining venture near Cripple Creek. But he had chiefly earned his living as a carpenter and furniture repairman, traveling, when necessary, to construction projects in various parts of the state. Having retired, he still puttered in his workshop and occasionally wrote poetry. In February 1924 he published a wistful poem, a lament for “the days of the old frontier.”
