Hide Article Text (OCR)
Austin Woman Helps In Recording Folklore By LORRAINE BARNES The sweet, frail voice of Mrs Mittie Banks Howard singing, “Come all you gallant soldiers, a story will tell,” links today with the misty, fragrant, fighting, build ing brawling past that is so par ticularly Texas’ own story. It also links past with future, for Mrs. Howard's songs are going to the Library of Congress, there to be studied and enjoyed long after her voice is still. She has recorded 11 of them, only a smattering of the hundred songs she knows. Some of the ballads have 20 or more verses, but Mrs. Howard can sing right through them without falt ering, just as she can recite pages and pages of Scott and Tennyson. “MY MOTHER SANG these songs, and her mother did. It is only natural that I should know them,” Mrs. Howard says. She is 79, in years and on pounds, a tiny lady whose back is straight as an arrow. She was born in Gol iad, just 20 miles from Fannin’s mission. Her father, Thomas Banks, moved his family to Bastrop Coun ty when she was a girl, and she married a young farmer, John Howard, and brought up her family there. Widowed now, Mrs. Howard divides her time between her daughters, Mrs. Frank Spiller of Austin and Mrs. L. T. Claybaugh of Dallas. Progressive blindness has limited her activities, but even when she is sitting, quite still in a chair, her feet not touching the floor, Mrs. Howard suggests the quickness and vitality associated with the frontier. Mrs. Howard's people were part and parcel of Texas from the time her grandfather came out of Vir ginia and settled in East Texas, while Texas still belonged to Mex ico; the pattern thereafter was spe cialized. For the men, war and re building after war. For the women, keeping family and farm together while the men were away. Mrs. Howard's grandmother was in The Runaway, a flight of women and children in advance of Santa Anna. Her mother's half-brother, John Harris, was a captive on the Mier Expedition. Family tradition says John drew a white bean, slipped it to a comrade, drew again and drew a second white bean, which meant he, too, would live. “It was the luck of the Irish,” Mrs. Howard says. ALL THE FAMILY had accumu lated in Texas was wiped out in the Civil War. Union soldiers delivered a final unforgivable affront by driving off the women’s last re maining mule. After that, they had to pack water on their own backs from the spring a half-mile away. The sentimentalists err on the side of granaeur. These Texans were not the Southerners of white-col umned verandas and grassy estates. Mrs. Howard was born in a log cabin. When times got better, her father built a yellow pine house— two big rooms with a center hail, a cedar bucket and dipper on the front porch, shedrooms under the sloping roof at the back. The men rose early—at 4 a. m.—and brewed strong coffee from beans they had parched and grown themselves. They had special endowments, not the least of which was the cul ture they brought along with them into Texas. Their love of poetry and song was kept alive in ballads so old that some of them, like “I'll Hang My Heart on the Willow Tree,” may date back to the Cru sades. “Having company” was a great convention of the frontier. The vis itors brought in songs of other frontiers, and that is one reason why Texas has such a wealth of this material. Mrs. Howard recorded her songs for a Radio House crew that took equipment to the Spiller home on a hilltop off the Bee Caves Road. One of them was a sentimental bal lad, “The Shadow of the Pines,” sung as a duet with her sister, Mrs. Nettie Banks Jensen of Dallas. ONE OF HER SONGS is “Shiloh Hill,” a favorite of her father’s. When it was sung in his time, he was so stirred that he acted out the battle in time to its rhythm.
Newspaper Details
Austin Sunday American Statesman
Austin, Texas, US
Sun, May 28, 1950
Page 17
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
USA 30 May 2026
Other Publications Near Austin, Texas
Austin Daily Texan
Austin Semi Weekly Statesman
Austin Christmas American Statesman
Austin Daily Statesman
Austin American
