The American Songbag was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1927. Sandburg had been collecting folk songs since the early 1900s, performing them at his lectures and poetry readings with a guitar. The Songbag gathered 280 songs with piano arrangements, guitar chords, and headnotes explaining where and from whom Sandburg collected each one.
The collection includes work songs (“John Henry,” “Casey Jones”), spirituals (“Go Down, Moses,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”), ballads (“Jesse James,” “Frankie and Johnny”), cowboy songs (“The Old Chisholm Trail”), railroad songs, chain gang songs, lullabies, nonsense songs, and political songs from labor movements. Many of these songs had never been published before; Sandburg collected them directly from singers he met in his travels — hoboes, coal miners, prisoners, cowboys, Black musicians in the South.
The Songbag preceded the formal folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s by decades. It was a direct influence on Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the entire folk music movement. Sandburg’s headnotes — conversational, anecdotal, providing context about who sang what to whom under what circumstances — made the songs accessible to readers who might never have heard them performed.
Collecting The American Songbag
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927): Large format, boards.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $100–$250
- Without jacket: $30–$80
- Signed: $200–$500