American author and collector of folksongs. Sandburg, the son of Swedish immigrants,
was born in Galesburg, Illinois. He is best known for his six-volume biography of
Abraham Lincoln, which was published between 1926 and 1939 and won him the
Pulitzer Prize in 1939, and for his poetry, which earned him a second Pulitzer Prize for
Complete Poems (1950).
While a teenager, Sandburg was possesssed of a restless wanderlust that drove him to
travel as a self-styled “Eternal Hobo.” Riding fireight trains across the country to
industrial centers and working odd jobs, such as delivering milk and washing dishes,
during the 1890s depression, Sandburg recorded folksongs in his pocket journals. In the
American heartland, Sandburg listened to hoboes, railroad workers, and harvest hands
sing about their frustrations and hopes. Returning to Illinois, Sandburg learned more
songs while selling stereographs door to door. He also served as district organizer for the
Social Democratic Party in Wisconsin and was secretary for Milwaukee’s Socialist
Mayor Emil Seidel, from 1910 to 1912. The job he held the longest, from 1917 to 1932,
was newspaper reporter for the Chicago Daily News.
After establishing himself as a writer, Sandburg embarked on a multivolume
biography of Lincoln. When he traveled on research trips, he also collected regional
folksongs. Presenting lectures and poetry readings to raise research funds for his Lincoln
biography, Sandburg concluded each session, playing his guitar and crooning ballads,
especially his favorite, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” Audience members provided him new
variations of lyrics and tunes.
As a folksinger, Sandburg preserved the American vernacular voice. Enchanted with
folk music, Sandburg collected new songs from labor organizers, folklorists, strangers,
and famous friends, including poet Robert Frost and journalist H.L.Mencken. He traced
versions’ origins and studied America’s history through its music, believing that songs
reflected average peoples’ life stories and feelings.
In 1926, at the same time that his two-volume Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
was released—the first part of the Lincoln-biography series—Sandburg recorded an
album of songs from Lincoln’s era. Inspired to publish a collection of his folksongs, he
compiled 280 songs in the well-received American Songbag (1927), one of the first books
of authentic American folksongs.
Sandburg introduced each song with a description of how he collected it. The songs
represented America’s diverse regional, socioeconomic, and ethnic characteristics.
Spirituals, railroad ballads, prison and work-gang blues, ditties, and military songs
depicted America from colonial days to the 20th century.
While preparing another Lincoln-biography volume, this one on the Civil War,
Sandburg collected American folk sayings, slang, and proverbs in The People, Yes
(1936). Sandburg’s New American Songbag (1950) offered additional folksongs that he
had collected during his travels. Sandburg concentrated the remainder of his literary work
on poetry and prose, enjoying folk music as entertainment on his Flat Rock, North
Carolina, goat-farm retreat, Connemara, where he died in July 1967 at age 89.
Elizabeth D.Schafer
References
D’Alessio, Gregory. 1987. Old Troubadour: Carl Sandburg with His Guitar Friends. New York:
Walker.
Niven, Penelope. 1991. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Salwak, Dale. 1988. Carl Sandburg: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K.Hall.
Sandburg, Helga. 1963. Sweet Music. A Book of Family Reminiscence and Song. New York: Dial.