The music of English-speaking people is very largely made up of these contributions from the folk-songs of dwellers in the wilder and more mountainous parts of the British Isles.  One rarely goes far out of the way in attributing to this source any air that he may hear that captivates him with its seductive opulence of harmony.  Exquisite melodies, limpid and unstrained as the carol of a bird in Spring-time, and as plaintive as the cooing of a turtle-dove seems as natural products of the Scottish Highlands as the gorse which blazons on their hillsides in August.  Debarred from expressing their aspirations as people of broader culture do—­in painting, in sculpture, in poetry and prose, these mountaineers make song the flexible and ready instrument for the communication of every emotion that sweeps across their souls.

Love, hatred, grief, revenge, anger, and especially war seems to tune their minds to harmony, and awake the voice of song in them hearts.  The battles which the Scotch and Irish fought to replace the luckless Stuarts upon the British throne—­the bloody rebellions of 1715 and 1745, left a rich legacy of sweet song, the outpouring of loving, passionate loyalty to a wretched cause; songs which are today esteemed and sung wherever the English language is spoken, by people who have long since forgotten what burning feelings gave birth to their favorite melodies.

For a century the bones of both the Pretenders have moldered in alien soil; the names of James Edward, and Charles Edward, which were once trumpet blasts to rouse armed men, mean as little to the multitude of today as those of the Saxon Ethelbert, and Danish Hardicanute, yet the world goes on singing—­and will probably as long as the English language is spoken—­“Wha’ll be King but Charlie?” “When Jamie Come Hame,” “Over the Water to Charlie,” “Charlie is my Darling,” “The Bonny Blue Bonnets are Over the Border,” “Saddle Your Steeds and Awa,” and a myriad others whose infinite tenderness and melody no modern composer can equal.

Yet these same Scotch and Irish, the same Jacobite English, transplanted on account of their chronic rebelliousness to the mountains of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, seem to have lost their tunefulness, as some fine singing birds do when carried from their native shores.

The descendants of those who drew swords for James and Charles at Preston Pans and Culloden dwell to-day in the dales and valleys of the Alleganies, as their fathers did in the dales and valleys of the Grampians, but their voices are mute.

As a rule the Southerners are fond of music.  They are fond of singing and listening to old-fashioned ballads, most of which have never been printed, but handed down from one generation to the other, like the ‘Volklieder’ of Germany.  They sing these with the wild, fervid impressiveness characteristic of the ballad singing of unlettered people.  Very many play tolerably on the violin and banjo, and occasionally one is found whose instrumentation may be called good.  But above this hight they never soar.  The only musician produced by the South of whom the rest of the country has ever heard, is Blind Tom, the negro idiot.  No composer, no song writer of any kind has appeared within the borders of Dixie.