This edition makes available, for the first time, Ruth Crawford Seeger's most visionary, detailed, and complex writing on American folk music. Entitled The Music of American Folk Song, this monograph was originally intended as an “Appendix” or “Introduction” for one of the finest collections of American folk song ever assembled, Our Singing Country (1941) (OSC), by John and Alan Lomax, with transcriptions by Ruth Crawford Seeger.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (RCS) scholars have documented the history and provenance of this monograph: its painstaking, demanding writing, editing, and eventual agonized and controversial demotion to a short “Music Preface,” which appeared in Our Singing Country. The most complete history is found in Judith Tick's recent biography of RCS. Matilda Gaume's early biography and a little known but pioneering master's thesis by Karen Cardullo are also important sources on the monograph.

The monograph's existence has been known to a few scholars for some thirty years, as well as to members of the Seeger family, who have long understood its importance for American folk music scholarship. Partially incomplete, unedited, somewhat scrambled, and missing some examples, it became a formidable and time-consuming— yet extremely rewarding—task to reconstruct and publish. RCS was “discovered” first by the contemporary “art” music community, so it is perhaps logical that her compositional work was dealt with before her folk music scholarship. In addition, most of her work on folk song had been published, in the three books of folk songs for children2 and in various other projects. There seemed, perhaps, less need to resurrect a difficult, technical, and rarified philosophical manuscript which had, in fact, been published (in drastically reduced form) as the Music Preface to OSC. Like Melville's Billy Budd, The Music of American Folk Song sat in a few well-placed drawers, known to just a few people. And as with Melville's posthumously published masterpiece, RCS's The Music of American Folk Song will come to be known as one of her most brilliant achievements.

Reading this monograph while listening to the original recordings (many of which are available on long-playing records and compact discs) is a rewarding experience. Following RCS's transcriptions, and reading her explanations, the reader/listener gets a sense of the extraordinary challenge she faced. Complicated written descriptions of minute decision-making procedures become resonant musical insights when listening to the tunes themselves.