When the songcatcher from Grand Forks, Franz Rickaby, died in California in 1925, he was much mourned, both for his scholarly work and for his charismatic persona. One obituary characterized him as “a young man of an unusually pleasing personality.” Of all the great songcatchers, I find Rickaby most appealing.
For the others — John Lomax, Louise Pound, Henry Belden, and so on — seem to me to have an aspirational aim of professional notice and advancement. Rickaby, I think because he knew his days were numbered on account of his heart condition, the result of a youthful case of rheumatic fever — Rickaby seems motivated by love, the pure joy of discovering and singing a ballad, the human interaction of collecting and performing, an affection for the ordinary people who were the repository of such a great folk literature.
Franz Rickaby was born into modest circumstances in Rogers, Arkansas, where his father taught music, his mother took in boarders. They moved to Illinois, where Franz dropped out of school and took to wandering in the fashion and circle of his personal friend, the tramp poet Vachel Lindsay. Returning to Illinois, Rickaby attended Knox College, where he met the love of his life, Lillian Katar. They were apart while Franz took his master’s at Harvard, but after that, in 1917, he returned to marry Lillian and take up a teaching job at the University of North Dakota.
I told the story earlier how Rickaby in 1919 hitchhiked to Grand Forks from Charlevoix, Michigan, but I did not mention why his starting point for that hike was Charlevoix. He was a caddy at the country club in Charlevoix. He continued this summer job while teaching at UND. While in Charlevoix he got to know a number of old shantymen from the lumber industry and commenced collecting their ballads.
Having responded enthusiastically to a reading of John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, Rickaby, on coming to Grand Forks, sensed there was songcatching to be done in the west. “I have become enamoured of the ballad!,” he wrote in his diary in 1919. He initiated a college course on the ballad and folklife that year.
Rickaby was determined, too, to collect ballads that “preserve for us deeds and circumstances of other days,” songs like “The Zebra Dun” and “Young Charlotte” — songs that remained extant “to a greater degree than is generally believed,” surviving “like the shattered but tenacious remains of an invaded folk.”
This rhetoric reveals that the songcatcher partook of the ideas of the vanishing native and the disappearing frontier that animated anthropological and historical discourse in the day. “The physical frontier of twenty-five years ago has disappeared,” he wrote in 1918, “and a cultural frontier exists in its stead.” Rickaby had to get out there on that cultural frontier, gathering and singing ballads, meeting the people. This extended to his unlikely summer job as a golf caddy, which not only had resulted in a scholarship to Harvard provided by country club donors but also continued to bring him into contact with fellow workers who sang to him of their lumberjacking days. That was in summer. Wintertime, as I have recounted, Rickaby traveled North Dakota on the prairie cultural frontier.
Which makes this an appropriate time of year to recall and honor North Dakota’s foremost songcatcher. Indeed, I have written a ballad of remembrance, “Forever Young,” recalling that night in 1919 when he collected the ballad, “Bury Me Not in the Deep Deep Sea,” from a Walsh County farm woman. One stanza goes,
Kitchen table with a kerosene light
Farmhouse ballad on a prairie night
Some dying words - burial at sea
Kitchen walls flicker mortality
