INTRODUCTION
In the spring of 1962 the University of Illinois Campus Folksong Club issued
a long playing record by the Philo Glee & Mandolin Society -- Paul Adkins,
Jim Hockenhull, Doyle Moore -- featuring 18 folksongs and instrumentals. Unlike
most other folk music records for sale. across the country, ours had a strictly
non-commercial purpose. We were trying to show that our Club, or at least some
of its members, had successfully assimilated the sounds and techniques of
traditional Appalachian music; that the Club had defined for its members a valid
meaning for the term "folk music"; that students in Champaign-Urbana --
almost totally deprived of academic guidance in the folk arts -- could learn to
recognize and appreciate traditional music and to make artistic judgments about
it. The PG&MS disc, after a year of drifting about the country and being
reviewed by the scholarly and not-so-scholarly journals, appears to have
accomplished its purpose. Our Club is now recognized as a force -- not an
overwhelming one -- but simply a power source, actual and potential, in the
field of traditional music. And that is where the matter stands -- and will
stand -- until the scholars and laymen have listened to CFC 201 -- Green Fields
of Illinois.
How and when we first got the idea of producing a disc of field recordings
from our home state is rather difficult to say with any degree of assurance. It
started to take shape when our members returned to campus in the fall of 1962,
flushed with the success of having disposed of some 500 copies of the PG&MS
record, in the spring and summer. The Club's Executive Committee soon authorized
its Record Production Committee to prepare a second pressing of the initial disc
in order to meet the slow but continual demand for more copies.
But at the back of everyone's mind lay the prospect of a new record. Along
with the usual round of folksings, concerts, workshops, and seminars there was
talk of the new disc: what would it cover, who would perform, how would it
relate to our first offering? A number of possibilities were considered by
members and were soon sorted into three basic categories: a record of a live
concert at Illinois featuring a guest artist; a folksing-type disc featuring a
potpourri of member talent; a field recording of traditional musicians in
Central and Southern Illinois. In retrospect the last choice seemed inevitable
for it flowed from the stated aims of the Club. Actually a complex of reasons
led to this path. The whole "folk revival" of the 1950's had not
produced a single LP of traditional Illinois folksongs. The Club felt the
challenge in filling a void and also in learning why Illinois had been
overlooked by collectors and recording companies. The prospect of pioneering was
itself exciting. It might be fun to collect at home instead of in the far off
and, seemingly, more romantic Southern Highlands. Some members were pleased at
the chance to meet and work with townspeople, to exchange songs and techniques,
to share experiences, to find homes away from home.
Preston Martin, who had guided the PG&MS offering into existence as well
as handling its successful distribution, now presented the Executive Committee
with a formal proposal for a traditional record. The decision was made, and work
began at once. The first task was to sound out friends we had already made in
the community and to seek out new talent. From the Club's inception some members
had jammed with town musicians at post-sing parties. Indeed, the very first
concert completely under the Club's aegis in May, 1961, had featured a local
bluegrass band -- Red Cravens and the Bray Brothers. But for our record there
seemed to be a consensus that we needed older persons and styles. The first
choice, then, pointed to Lloyd and Cathy Reynolds, Champaign residents and
Church of God gospel singers. They had been the first traditional performers to
appear at the Club folksing late in 1961 and had been most helpful to the
PG&MS while the trio prepared for its own disc. The Reynoldses were pleased
at the chance to place a selection of sacred songs on our record, for they
already knew all the Club members who would be involved in taping and
production. The assent of the Reynoldses now focused attention on other choices
for the disc.
In September, 1962, Archie Green, Club faculty advisor, had become acquainted
by chance with Lyle Mayfield, a Southern Illinois printer who had just moved to
Champaign to accept the job of day foreman at the Daily Illini, the University's
student newspaper. Lyle, as it developed, had been working since his teens at
acquiring the old tunes his mother and relatives used to sing and play. He was
proficient, on guitar, mandolin, bass, harmonica, and fiddle, and his wife
Doris, had spent over ten years perfecting a simple, old-timey duet singing
style. He had taught Doris to play the guitar as well, and likewise had busied
himself at writing his own ballads about life love, and death in the low,
rolling hills of Southern Illinois.
In October the Mayfields were invited to make their first appearance at the
Club's regular Friday night folksing. They were immediately accepted and soon
became solidly entrenched as two of the Club's most popular and respected
performer-members. They were invited into members' homes and promptly responded
by inviting Club members to their own home in northwest Champaign, where
tradition- starved college students happily regaled themselves with folksongs,
gospel tunes, Southern Illinois lore, Lyle's bountiful supply of tapes and old
records, and, no less important Doris Mayfield's home cooking.
Through the Mayfields we suddenly realized that we had failed to see the
flowers that were growing in our own back yard. We had overlooked the fact that
Champaign-Urbana lies in the heart of rural America, and that many of its
residents had saved the music that belonged to their parents. On questioning
Lyle we found that Southern Illinois was still full of active country musicians,
and Lyle himself proved it by playing us tapes that he had recorded in the
region around his own home town of Greenville. He promised to bring us some of
his friends to perform at a folksing. On February 28, 1963, Lyle brought the
Club one of his oldest and most respected musical friends - Mrs. Stelle Elam of
Brownstown. Lyle brought her on stage at the folksing as soon as he and Doris
had finished their performance, with Lyle backing her up on guitar, Mrs. Elam
performed four of her old-timey fiddle numbers, to what was perhaps the longest
and loudest applause ever received by an artist in the history of our folksings.
Mrs. Elam was an unqualified success, having won the admiration of the
membership by her skill and interpretation, as well as by her obvious devotion
to her tradition.
More important for the buyers of this record, however, was the recording
session staged the night before that folksing in the home of Club member Thacher
Robinson in Urbana. Using a twin-track stereo tape machine operating at 15
inches per second, Robinson captured some 20 of Mrs. Elam's finest fiddle tunes,
many of which we had never heard before. John Schmidt, then president of the
Campus Folksong Club, assisted Robinson, while Judy McCulloh, academic
folklorist from Indiana University and resident of Urbana, took notes and made
separate tapes for her own studies. We are indebted to Mrs. McCulloh for the
biographical details of Mrs. Elam's background, as well as for much of the
research into the latter's music.
From this point forward the disc quickly took shape. With Mrs. Elam's fiddle
tunes already on tape, the Mayfields and Reynoldses were recorded in night
sessions the following week. These took place in John Schmidt's home, with John
acting as engineer, assisted by sundry Club members.
At the same time, the groundwork was being laid for taping the fourth and
final group. Preston Martin and Mrs. McCulloh were already interviewing the
Goodwin family of Urbana, who came from Southern Illinois in 1920, bringing with
them not only the music on their lips but also two large notebooks filled
with the words of their songs.
Like the other performers on the disc, the Goodwins had been
"discovered" by Club members almost by chance. The Reynoldses had been
invited to a Club folksing by a member of their Church who had worked with the
Club on the 1961 Jimmie Driftwood concert. Lyle Mayfield had performed at a
folksing after his chance meeting with Archie Green in a campus printshop, and
he, in turn, had invited Mrs. Elam to a folksing. Jim and Cecil Goodwin,
however, had never appeared at any Club function, although they lived but a
stone's throw from the campus. In October, 1962, Vic Lukas -- a co-founder of
the Club and a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist -- had simply met Jim Goodwin on
a Greyhound bus. Jim was carrying a banjo, and the pair began swapping songs and
tunes right then and there. The bus session led to home visits, and Vic led his
Club colleagues -- tape recorders in hand -- to the Goodwins.
The Goodwins, it turned out, had been folksong collectors before most present
members of the Campus Folksong Club were born.
Only back then it was not called collecting, but "song swapping,"
and the Goodwins were masters at it. For many years Cecil and Jim Goodwin had
wandered with their widowed father in search of work, filling in their less
productive hours by playing at square dances and company picnics. This continued
until music began to interfere with Cecil's newly acquired family life, and he
laid down the guitar for 20 years, taking it up again only when our Committee
asked him to record for us. When we asked what he could sing, Cecil's wife
turned to the two massive songbooks, composed of carefully written long hand
texts of all the songs the boys had picked up in their years of wandering. In
the books we found the ballads -- many of them apparently never recorded before
-- which the Goodwins had carried with them out of Southern Illinois, Arkansas,
and Kentucky. Our work was complete. Within a few days the last tapes for CFC
201 had been cut and only the laborious job of selection remained, for the
actual amount of material recorded from all the artists was about five times
that which could be contained on a single disc.
Here, then, we present our final selections. Some of them have been recorded
before -- the old favorites -- which appear to be more "favorite" than
"old," for they continually reappear, thumbing their noses at all
efforts to "play them to death." Others we discovered for the first
time -- old songs that were new to us and will, no doubt, be new to many of this
record's audience.
And the purpose of our disc? Of course we offer it to the scholars; we hope
they will be able to make use of it. But to the greater part of its audience we
offer it for enjoyment -- musical enjoyment -- as well as for the satisfaction
that comes when we rediscover our musico-historical heritage. To our artists we
offer this record as a tribute to their musical skill, the pride with which they
bear their heritage, and the dogged persistence they showed in preserving and
improving their songs through wars, depressions and family troubles -- in good
times and bad -- until they brought to the generation of the 1960's this
chronicle in music.
introduction by:
Archie Green
Fritz K. Plous, Jr.
"Green Fields Of
Illinois" was a record of traditional folk music performed by artists from
southern Illinois, released by the Campus Folksong Club of the University
of Illinois in 1963. It was accompanied by a booklet with extensive
documentation about the artists and their songs. At this website I have
reproduced much of the content of that booklet as well as some of the images and
cover art.
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GREEN FIELDS OF ILLINOIS --