This weekend I made a big step forward on my book, Yesterday’s Songs Transformed. I took some of the accumulated material and started building chapters out of it. Here’s what I have so far:

• 1: Living Songs
• 2: Ancient and Medieval Songs
• 3: The Child and Grandchild Ballads
• 4: The Unfortunate Rake
• 5: Colonial America
• 6: The American Civil War
• 7: Approaching the Modern Age

This isn’t a scholarly book; I’ve decided not to use footnotes, though I’ll list my sources. It’s a walk through history and the way that songs change and take new forms for new purposes. Here are the opening paragraphs of the first chapter:

Songs are alive. They breed, hybridize, mutate, and evolve. They find new niches to survive in. Sometimes they feed on other songs.
 

They’re powerful. A song’s message isn’t just the straightforward meaning of its words. Those words might say very little if looked at objectively, but combined with the music and a context they can convey a lot more. Once a song is lodged in a culture, it has a power beyond what its words say. This makes it a weapon to be used, and perhaps captured for a new use.
 

Since the earliest songs of prehistory, people have transformed songs for new purposes. They adjust a line to fit a new situation. They rewrite the lyrics to express a different view, possibly an opposing one. They devise a more clever line, or at least think it is. They misremember a lyric and give it an original twist.
 

There as many reasons for transforming songs as for writing them in the first place. Daniel Letvin’s The World in Six Songs claims these reasons boil down to six: friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love. But fitting all the world’s songs into these categories requires interpreting them very broadly. People sing about rulers, revolutions, love, hatred, freedom, slavery, hope, despair, and much more. Even that’s very broad. Few songs are about these ideas in the abstract. They’re about particular people, events, and manifestations. Every situation that people strongly care about can give rise to a song. To multiple songs. Songs that challenge each other.

My plan is to release Yesterday’s Songs Transformed as an e-book, probably on Smashwords. I’m undecided about whether to go for crowdfunding. Online communities have broken down since my last crowdfunding campaign, and I’m not sure I can make it work any more. If I do, it will be basically a way for people to support and pre-order the book. I’ll come up with some perks for supporters.