Sung Locally - Folksongs of The Catskills

By Bradley Towle

CATSKILLS REGION — Folksongs of The Catskills is a 1963 Smithsonian Folkways collection of traditional songs performed by Barbara Moncure and Harry Siemsen. An Ohio native, Moncure spent many summers in the Catskills as a child. A classically trained, Julliard-taught musician, she had a revelation while living in Texas with her husband and young children. After hearing music on a jukebox, Moncure recalled the traditional music she had heard in her youth in the Catskills and began exploring folk music. Following her husband's tragic death, she relocated to the region and poured herself into the world of folksongs in the area. At one point, Siemsen was a Catskills resident and the official historian for the Town of Kingston. He brought the perspective of someone who learned the folksongs through an oral tradition to the album.

The duo paired, and the resulting album is a 16-song collection that spans themes and song origins as wide-ranging as the geography they cover. The extensive liner notes dive deeply into the landscape, history, and traditions of The Catskills that continue to inspire arts of all kinds. Some songs included will be recognizable, even if somewhat altered. "A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go (Froggie Went A-Courtin')" sounds nothing like the versions of the song I remember hearing as a child.

With its origins in 16th-century Scotland, the romantic exploits of Froggie have gone through many iterations (including a 1992 Bob Dylan cover). Like ancient oral traditions, folk songs are often regionalized or altered for different audiences. The songs included in this collection are no exception.

"Mrs. Edgar Leaycraft supplied the first six verses, and papers dated 1873 belonging to a school girl and found in a Saugerties attic, provided the final three verses," explains the liner notes about the song. Other songs specifically mention the Catskills. One Ernest "Joker" Burgher claimed to have written "The Delhi Jail," and it may be that he did compose the number included in the collection. The liner notes explain that the lyrics share similarities with other compositions.

"In spite of' references to the Delaware County Jail, similar sentiments have been used to describe local lockups across the country." But so goes the tradition of folksongs. As they traveled, they often became regionalized and, at times, merely adopted as having already been based on localized circumstances. "The Lexington Murder," for example, is "one of the most widely collected murder ballads" and went by a variety of names ("The Oxford Tragedy," "The Wexford Girl," "The Cruel Miller," to name a few). The author of the liner notes indicates that it had been sung in the Catskills by one Frank Joy, who may have believed he was singing about an actual incident in the Greene County town of Lexington (it's been said that murder ballads were a form of news reporting, but they're nothing if not rumors as well).

Some songs are specific to the Catskills. Barbara Moncure and Harry Siemsen interviewed a 106-year-old man named Jessie Ellsworth about the "D. and H. Canal Song," which includes lyrics Siemsen found in an 1850 Kingston newspaper as well as the first verse, supplied by Ellsworth, who had worked on the D. and H. Canal as a boy. Folksongs of the Catskills captures a wide swatch of the traditional songs found in the region, whether they had traveled from Europe or were born in the famed New York mountain range.

However, the collection is only half as interesting if one does not read the accompanying liner notes, available for download from Smithsonian Folkways. Folksongs of The Catskills is also available to stream across several platforms.