CHAPTER 13
Earliest Oregon Songs
And there sat faithless she A-frying sassingers for he. SUNG BY DR. NEWELL IN THE 40'S .
From all accounts, there was much singing among the emigrants on their slow way, with many evening camps, across the plains. It is not too much to expect that, as the long cow- columns kept moving westward, there would have been developed an Emigration Song, or several of them, but if there was such a covered wagon anthem, it cannot be located. Other indigenous songs that may have been com posed after the emigrants arrived and made their homes in Oregon in the 40's and 50's, if they were composed and sung to any extent, have not been pre served in the principal libraries of the state. No clues of their present existence could be secured from the good recollectors among the prominent second-gener ation pioneers still surviving in Portland and at Ore gon City; historians could recall nothing in the way of actual songs from their wide reading or numerous interviews; the leading musicians, in their familiarity with folk songs, had no acquaintance with Oregon Trail or Oregon pioneer ballads. Music has been a neglected field of research among state historians; no one has been interested enough or well enough in formed to give it anything like the attention that al most every other topic has received in books, in news paper articles or in the Quarterly of the Historical So ciety. It looks very much as though it is too late now ever to do much about the folk music of early Oregon,
