Chords in Folk?

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Harmonium Hero
Date: 04 May 08 - 06:04 PM

WAV "... on keyboards I use both hands for just the top line"
Try playing a drone with one hand. Or better, get an Indian harmonium. These usually have drones - up to five - and you pick the two (tonic/dominant) for the key you want. One hand pumps the bellows, while the other plays the melody. No need to do more, although you can throw in the odd fifth or octave, or be more adventurous if you want. Drones give a basic harmony, and playing or singing against drones is a long-standing tradition in popular music throughout Europe and the Middle East; bagpipes, hurdy gurdies, zithers of the langeleik/epinette/Appalachian dulcimer type, and fiddles have used drones since the Middle Ages and earlier. England has not been immune.....
John Kelly.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: M.Ted
Date: 04 May 08 - 05:49 PM

Art songs from folk songs, and also folk songs from art songs--

My point above, lost as usual, is and was not that WAV is either good or bad at music, poetry, or I"MHO philosophy", but that he is actively engaged in the process--listening to, playing, learning about, and thinking about the whole fabric of folk/tradition, which is what keeps it all alive--

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Tootler
Date: 04 May 08 - 05:09 PM

WAV,If your first serious experience of English Folk music was the Northumbrian Gathering at Morpeth, then surely you must have heard Nortumbrian pipes being played in two part harmony. Fiddlers and other instrumentalists also do it in this part of the country, it is part of the tradition hereabouts and harmony parts are written for popular dance tunes. I have been guilty of writing such harmony parts myself. I find it quite a satisfying challenge to come up with a harmony part that is also a worthwhile melody in its own right.

If harmony is not part of the tradition, then perhaps you can explain the popularity of various squeezeboxes with their built in chords - the players certainly made use of them. Going further back, Thomas Hardy's village band in "Under the Greenwood Tree" consisted of three fiddles and a Cello. Don't tell me the cello simply doubled the melody an octave (or two) lower.

No, I think it more likely than not that harmony has long been part of the tradition. It is informal harmony, often improvised, rather than the formal harmony taught in music schools and often commits such heinous sins as singing in parallel fifths and octaves.

Of course there is a tradition of unaccompanied solo singing as well. If that's what you like, fine, but please don't tell others what they should and should not be doing - not that they'll take any notice.

Geoff

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 04 May 08 - 05:02 PM

Frankly, John, when, on weekends, I go through my repertoire from Hymns Ancient and Modern and see 3 lines other than what I'm playing, I think it's beyond my musical abilities - certainly on the tenor-recorder! and on keyboards I use both hands for just the top-line.
But, on top of that, if you'll pardon the pun, I really do like hearing just top-lines well played or sung, and that's one reason why folk is my favourite genre.
Also, I think that a lot of folk in pubs (if not the stage) is just so nowadays - at sessions most are playing just the tune, yes?..and, at the singarounds I attend, more than half are indeed singing unaccompanied.
And I shall check that shortly, Marje...I'm wondering how many part harmony..?...all singing just the tune in close harmony, or something more sophisticated..?..art-songs from folk-songs, which apparently (I watched an early music series on the BBC a couple of years ago) also goes back centuries..?

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Harmonium Hero
Date: 04 May 08 - 04:48 PM

Me again. Sorry to be boring, but another point I meant to make concerns the collectors. Their main concern was to note down the melody and lyrics, not to make a note of how the songs were sung. (And, as we know, they found wide variation in melody and lyrics - not to mention the same song sung to different tunes, and tunes being used for different songs; so much for purity.) Somebody mentioned C. Sharp's activities in the Appalachians; a friend of mine, who knows rather more about this than I do, tells me that when it became known that Sharp didn't want the songs accompanied, and paid more for them if they weren't, peope left the banjos at home. Was this Sharp not wanting the distraction of accompaniment while making his notes, or something more sinister? We know, of course that some collectors were not averse to making the facts fit their own prejudices.
John Kelly.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Harmonium Hero
Date: 04 May 08 - 04:13 PM

I've been playing folk music publicly for 40 years (not wishing to pull rank, you understand) and for several years before that at home or with friends. For all of that time I've been listening to people making authoritative statements about how English folk songs should be sung , and it always prompts the same two questions: who says so? and on what authority? Folk songs are what people sing, regardless of their provenance. I am of the belief that there is no definable difference between 'popular' and 'folk', as has been touched on in other posts; any definition for one applies equally to the other. These songs are not 'folk' because of how you sing them, but because you do. Some people like to tell us that we should be singing English songs as the shepherds, ploughboys and carters' lads sang them in the back rooms of country inns in the years before the Industrial Revolution. I would make two contentions about that. Firstly, they weren't following any rules about how to sing folk songs, because there weren't any rules. Nobody had told them they were singing folk songs; they were just singing popular songs. Secondly, If you deliberately, and as a metter of policy, sing the songs in the way that you suppose it was done then - not that any of us can remember that far back - then what you are doing is not 'folk' or 'traditional'; it's period music. Nowt wrong with that; I have been involved - on and off - with period music for about 35 years; playing music of an era on instruments of that era and in the way - to the best of our knowledge - it was played then. The pretence is that it's the 13thC or 16thC or whatever, and not that it's folk music.
I have heard people referring to 'the purity of the melody', as though a folk song melody is somehow more pure than any other, and is free from harmonic taint. It isn't. There are inherent harmonies. Some of us can hear them, and some, I suppose, can't. And not only that, but what one person hears may not be the same as what another hears. I have no problem with unaccompanied singinsg or playing - I have done plenty of it myself. But when I accompany a song, whether it be a complex - almost baroque - confection or simply melody/drone, or melody with a few bare fifths or octaves thrown in here and there, it's expressing the way that that song sounds in my head. WAV might not like to listen to it; that's up to him. He has made the comment in one or two posts that what he's learned so far is to play melody. Lots of us have been at it a lot longer; maybe in time he'll find himself doing more. but it won't make the music any less - or any more - valid as folk music.
John Kelly.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Marje
Date: 04 May 08 - 02:16 PM

WAV, you might like to look out for the follow-up album to "Voices". Also by Fellside and featuring big-name voices, it's called "Voices in Harmony". Great stuff.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: M.Ted
Date: 04 May 08 - 02:05 PM

WAV's thread has started a discussion that has been very informative--I have been curious about the role of instrumental accompaniment in the various UK folk traditions, and have always been dubious of the idea that unaccompanied singing was some sort of cultural universal.

Music spreads easily, and the idea that in something must be popular before it can become traditional makes a lot of sense to me--in a way, the idea of "traditional" music ignores the fact that music is primarily disseminated laterally, that is, within a culture, in a place and time--Paul Simon said that "Every generation sends a hero up the pop charts", and the evidence is that it has ever been so--

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 04 May 08 - 09:06 AM

If you check, Eric, I've been talking about/debating the issue, and frankly answering those who questioned me. E.g, I just mentioned Voices: English traditional songs - nothing in that for me, but some may find the sleevenotes, which are on the web (at the top via a Yahoo search), intersting and relevant to the topic.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 04 May 08 - 08:26 AM

WalkaboutsVerse eh, a self made man who worships his creator, doesn't he just love all this discussion about himself.

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

eric

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 04 May 08 - 07:54 AM

"To use this distorted picture as blueprint for how things should be done is perhaps a tad misguided, unless of course it fits ones personal agenda, or else ability, in which case one might expect a little more by way of humility when it comes to discussing a subject that, one suspects, might hot have figured very highly, if at all, in their pic n' mix humanities degree."...Is that fair?...I admitted, above, I knew little of polyphony and chords (just, rather, learning, playing and singing simply the top-line-melody), and I'll add, being yet more precise, that there was no musicolgy department within the school of anthropology where I finished my humanities degree - which should, though, have taught me what to look for when I got into folk. Another thing that I found helpful was a tape called Voices, which had some of the "big-names" from the English folk-scene of the 80s selecting an E. trad. each - most done with "monophonic modality", Sedayne.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 04 May 08 - 06:05 AM

In the light of other threads (in particular those about Bert Lloyd) I've been thinking about the extent to which Traditional English Folk Song ever existed as an autonomous phenomenon, and to what extent it ever permeated English Culture as a whole. One wonders what else these Traditional singers of Traditional English Folk Song were singing, and how they might have been singing it.

And to what extent can we consider any aspect of English Culture as being autonomous (and therefore distinct) from that of its neighbours? The answer is, of course, we can't. The recordings of Davie Stewart, John McDonald and others would indicate that in Scotland accordions were traditionally used to accompany folk song. Traditional English singer Bob Roberts accompanied himself on a melodeon, and I'm quite sure he wasn't alone in this. So the evidence for chordal accompaniments to Traditional English Folk Song is there if you look for it.

Monophonic modality was considered a defining characteristic of Traditional English Folk Song by early collectors & I've heard it suggested that they were so bent on their agenda in this respect that songs that did not fit this criteria were overlooked, thus giving the somewhat distorted picture that has come down to us today.

To use this distorted picture as blueprint for how things should be done is perhaps a tad misguided, unless of course it fits ones personal agenda, or else ability, in which case one might expect a little more by way of humility when it comes to discussing a subject that, one suspects, might hot have figured very highly, if at all, in their pic n' mix humanities degree.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 04 May 08 - 05:20 AM

I doubt if England ever had very different instrumental lineups for dancing than Scotland. The point is that dance tunes were conceived for ensembles that had basses or harmonic potential, and when they were played by solo instruments the dancers would be filling in an accompaniment in their heads, just as they do now when hearing a well-known pop tune sung as a solo line.

Often if you haven't heard a tune with its original backing, it loses so much that you can't imagine why anybody would care about it. I don't listen to much pop music and never have, so when some kid starts singing a current hit on the bus I can't see anything in it. If I'd heard it in its original band arrangement I'd know why they were so enthusiastic about it. Most people's experience of traditional tunes is similar; they haven't experienced them played with a full band sound, and they sound just weedy as solo lines when you don't know where they came from. (Shetland fiddling is one genre where a solo melody instrument has usually been the norm, but it has often used scordatura tunings to add a quasi-drone, is often played by two fiddles in only partial unison, and it was designed to be played in tiny spaces where a solo melody has proportionately more impact).

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 04 May 08 - 04:23 AM

"TELLING &/or dancing, via the repetition of relatively simple TUNES." (me)...most people, JC!, would understand this to include the SINGING of folk lyrics...and I like you mentioning differences in Scotland, as I love our world being multicultural; further, I think this from you is worth repeating: "This does NOT mean these tunes have canonical chordings like modern pop tunes."
"Walkaboutverse has only been interested in folk music for a few years(how few is up for grabs, as he gives different numbers in different places)" (Ted)...There were some songs I somehow knew already (perhaps primary school in Aus.) but, yes, I've only been into folk for a few years - 2002 I turned up at the 35th Morpeth Northumbrian Gathering (which I've already posted, but follow the link above if you wish); I ended my collection "Walkabouts: travels and conclusions in verse" at the end of 2002 and began making songs or "Chants from Walkabouts", which I first sang, along wiht E. trads, at folk clubs in 2004; Is that precise enough for you? You then go on to be critical (sacrificing yourself in the process!), so I'll say that, although relatively knew, I did have a degree in humanities behind me, and that many of my poems have, since self-publication, been published elsewhere (again see above link, if you wish).

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 04 May 08 - 02:09 AM

M.Ted.

Thank you for explaining about duckhead dolk singers...

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: M.Ted
Date: 04 May 08 - 12:39 AM

Walkaboutverse has only been interested in folk music for a few years(how few is up for grabs, as he gives different numbers in different places), and thinking back, in my early enthusiasm, I remember having made quite a few presumptuous and erroneous pronouncements about folk music myself(not to mention the presumptuous and erroneous pronouncements that I've made more recently).

I also have a lot of bad poetry that I wrote, and sang, with varying degrees of success. In fact, I stumbled across a box of old lyrics just this morning, so I am very reluctant to be dismissive of anyone else's efforts-

As to the issue of ego--It has been fairly convincingly put forward that, in order to perform or create in any genre or medium, one must be firmly and unshakingly self-absorbed, and supremely confident that, whatever anyone else may think say, your work, and the world view that it embodies, is the most important(though often useful to affect modesty)-

So, all things considered, he's in good company here--

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 03 May 08 - 07:40 PM

The dickhead who started this thread began by talking about tunes and then didn't discuss anything but songs thereafter.

The dance music of the British Isles has been accompanied for centuries. Illustrations or descriptions of performances as far back as the Middle Ages mention drums and bass instruments.   Almost as soon as Scottish dance music began to published in large volume in the18th century, it was published with bass lines.   Virtually all the current Scottish dance tune repertoire (except pipe tunes) was conceived for textures including a cello or left-hand keyboard part. It mostly sounds crap on a solo melody instrument (and so do pipe tunes if you take the drones away and put nothing in their place).

This does NOT mean these tunes have canonical chordings like modern pop tunes. They were not conceived with the harmony first; the chords or bass vamps simply serve to delineate phrases in the dance, they don't "progress". It doesn't matter a great deal what the chords are so long as they change with the right timing.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 03 May 08 - 05:47 PM

"If it's a good song and singer, accompaniment can detract from the performance, I think; "

I think it can but I think it can also enhance. The performers are free to make their choices and I as a listener may find versions of songs I prefer which may or may not be accompanied ones.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,The Mole Catcher's unplugged Apprentice
Date: 03 May 08 - 05:10 PM

Look, for the last time, as far as I'm concerned, music is NOT a static museum piece, or pieces, it grows, it changes, it evolves

you said...

" It's widely accepted that for centuries it didn't change much - singing unaccompanied, repeating a tune for dance; and, I think, not just because there was not much other entertainment available to these folk, or the pride that they took in their tradition, but because just the top-line melody played or sung well sounds great.

well, sunshine, those days are long gone (as well as open field farming) , and all for the good. I and many others going to continue to 'plug in' and play. Me. I'll play my Strat as well as play my acoustic guitar, as well as sing unaccompanied, solo and with others, and dance a bloody jig if I want to.!!! (oh look a plethora of exclamation marks *LOL*)...oh and if I want to use, as an example, North American native drummers as accompaniment (which I have done) I will...got it? Good. Not very English I know, but there ya go.

Charlotte R

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 04:50 PM

If it's a good song and singer, accompaniment can detract from the performance, I think; and I wish more people would get a chance to hear good unaccompanied singing...it's found at festivals and clubs, of course, and occasionally on folk-radio - but a lot miss-out.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 03 May 08 - 03:56 PM

For print, I'd agree with you. For a semi-formal setting, such as an internet forum, perefectly acceptable. "The, CR, centuries-old, franework...." sounds bad even in speech.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 03:41 PM

What about economy of exclamation-marks, V.?!

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 03 May 08 - 03:30 PM

WAV, reading through your posts reminds me of something Evelyn Waugh once said.
"to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee."
Articles should not be cut off from their objects!!!!!!

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,The Mole Catcher's unplugged Apprentice
Date: 03 May 08 - 03:02 PM

As I posted somewhere else...If I wanted a lecture I'd be in a university lecture hall

Umm and yu like metre and/or rhyme with reason?....well ooooook, what ever you say *LOL*

Volgadon, I do believe I agree with you on that point *LOL*

Charlotte R

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 02:56 PM

The, CR, centuries-old, frameworks of both poetry and folk were, to some extent, chopped last century; followed by, in both, much rationalisation - "things change or they die" "it enables us to easily translate the poems into other languages", etc...
I like metre and/or rhyme with reason; I like hearing just the top-line melody played and sung.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 03 May 08 - 02:54 PM

Hmm, if Ezra Pound played folk music, he'd probably play grace notes exclusively.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: The Mole Catcher's Apprentice (inactive)
Date: 03 May 08 - 02:32 PM

How is Ezra Pound chopping poetry analogous to chords being used to play trad music?

ummmmmm...it isn't?

so Tom and Dick was wanderin' along a country lane, and Dick, taking the straw from his mouth, pointed at some sheep and says, "them there sheep is an hypotheses", Tom looks thoughtful for a moment, and taking his straw from his mouth says "Have you bin drinking with the vicar again?"

well it makes just about as much sense as WAV's analogies*LOL*. That passage can be found in the liner notes to Steeleye Span's Below The Salt, I believe. :-)

Cheers
Charlotte R

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 02:24 PM

"Frameworks", VD

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 03 May 08 - 02:19 PM

How is Ezra Pound chopping poetry analogous to chords being used to play trad music?
Personaly, I detest Ezra Pound and friend, but I can't say that WAV's makes much poetic sense either.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,The Mole catcher's unplugged Apprentice
Date: 03 May 08 - 01:25 PM

that 'verse' makes absolutely no sense at all...go figure

comparing the English popular music to American pop is once more comparing apples and oranges..but what else is new?

Well Don, I won't be using it to introduce a song anytim soon *LOL*

Cheers

Charlotte R

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,DonMeixner
Date: 03 May 08 - 12:53 PM

Hi Charlotte,

Knobhead he may have been but I was expecting something significantly more rude and descriptive. Like That Hopeless Bludgeon Bastard Cecil #.
Or That Pea Brained Codswallop.

I only partially agree with Eliza. The song doesn't start out as popular but it is made popular by the quality of the people singing it. However, I'd bet that wordologist could defend Folk and Popular as having the same roots. (Popular from populi meaning people. Folk from folk meaning folk/people. Or something to that effect.)

Hows all that for being over scholarly?

Don

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 12:47 PM

Analogous to this DEBATE is what's happened to poetry - for centuries!, it was about telling WITHIN the framework of metre and/or rhyme, until Ezra Pound and friends decided that framework should be chopped (sound familiar?)...

Poem 148 of 230: AUDIENCE LOST

I returned, again,
    To what they pen -
The free-verse poets:
    Deep prose in sets...
I could read, again,
    Of Mice and Men.

From walkaboutsverse.741.com

...and I think most of the changes to English-folk were also of the last century, with little before that; and, yes, it seems it was popular - but with a very different framework from that of American-pop!

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,The Mole Catcher's unplugged Apprentice
Date: 03 May 08 - 12:32 PM

Don she referred to Cecil # as a knobhead. the quote is:

"Folk music is pop music. How else can a classic tune survive, other than being popular How else can a classic tune survive being collected by a knobhead like Cecil Sharp?."

- sourced from the promo material for EC's upcoming CD Dreams of Breathing Underwater

Charlotte R

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,DonMeixner
Date: 03 May 08 - 12:17 PM

Hi Charlotte,

What is Eliza's principle bitch with poor maladjusted and much maligned
Cecil Sharp(No "P")?

Don

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,The Mole Catcher's unplugged Apprentice
Date: 03 May 08 - 12:05 PM

I see WAV has created YET another canvass for his seemingly never ending ego.
As for chords in folk....as Captain Swing has already stated...times change...live with it, besides which this vision of jolly olde England with high tea, evensong and ye game of tennis never actually existed, except perhaps in the mind of the editor of the Daily Telegraph, and that was at some point in the 1950's

Fishing and playing an instrument doesn't work..you tend to put the worm on the end of the wrong thing *LOL*

Charlotte R

ps..didn't Eliza Carthy call Cecil Sharp a rude name recently? With which, by the way I entirely agree *LOL*

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Les from Hull
Date: 03 May 08 - 12:02 PM

Of course, if you record someone who is singing solo and unaccompanied you are not going to hear much harmony are you?

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 03 May 08 - 11:54 AM

Ok, I'm not much of an angler, so experts please pitch in, but wouldn't it be a bit difficult to play an instrument and fish at the same time?
I would suspect that most rural folk couldn't afford an instrument, or spare a lot of time to practice playing it.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,DonMeixner
Date: 03 May 08 - 11:43 AM

Hi Walkabouts

I believe Cecil Sharpe found many English songs existing in what has been considered virtually pure forms being sung on the Outer Bank Islands of the Carolinas as well as in the remoter parts of the Appalachians. This was prior to and about the time of WWI, The Great War for you British Types. He found them being sung in harmony with chorded instruments. I won't say that this is the way these songs arrived in the States. But I will say even in these very remote areas that is the way these songs developed. So it isn't a stretch to say that is what happened in the UK 200 years earlier.

Don

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,JM
Date: 03 May 08 - 10:56 AM

"It's not fishy, JM: I'm not into fishing but somehow heard about and checked out this book, The Complete Angler, for it's verses, and it did indeed make several references to unaccompanied singing for a fish or two. So that was in the 17th century, and I also mentioned the Joseph Taylor recordings when someone asked for some concrete evidence about the many centuries of UA singing I mentioned above. It's not I, JM, who is deluding himself."

No, you are wrong. Just because you can find an example of someone singing unaccompanied does not mean that (I quote..) "It's widely accepted that for centuries it didn't change much - singing unaccompanied, repeating a tune for dance;". Nobody was disputing that people have sung accompanied for centuries, I am disputing that that is ALL they did.

In fact, all the documentation and historical evidence is against you. The term Heterophony was coined by Plato (428-347 BC), and there are surviving treatises on Organum harmony singing from around 845 AD. The Sheffield Carols, to pick one example, have been sung in impromptu harmony for at least a couple of hundred years.

Besides, I'm with Captain Swing. What bearing does any of this have on "losing culture" or "society suffering"? Theres a quote from Isaac Newton about successive scientific achievements being made "standing on the shoulders of giants" - do you not want to see our culture continue to build on everything that has gone before and develop forwards and upwards? I love my country and its musical heritage and I love hearing new things and being inspired by what is happening now. I simply cannot understand your point of view, and I especially cannot understand your desire to tell others how they should do things. By all means enjoy the things you enjoy, and disapprove of things you don't like, but don't try to justify it with facts unless you have checked they are correct and you have thought it through.

And, in true dragons den style, for that reason - I'm out.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 10:49 AM

But, Don, when musically-trained types went out into the field to record folk-singers (many of whom could neither read nor write words - let alone music) they found them singing, unaccompanied, to a repeated relatively-simple tune, and were told that what they were performing had been passed-down to them, by ear..?

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,DonMeixner
Date: 03 May 08 - 10:32 AM

Hi Walkabouts.

I learn so much from this site over the years. I never would have guess that the English peasant lack so much in imagination as to never musically experiment with the one instrument they likely could afford. Their voices. I just can't buy your premise Walkabout. Not because I can prove it but because when couched with human nature it doesn't make sense.

At some point someone will get bored with what they are singing and rather than leave the After Witch Burning party, they'll try something a little different.

Sea Chanteys were meant to keep time, I can almost buy the idea in this arena. But Foc'sle Chanteys were for entertainment and even on the eve of the Spanish Armada I'll bet some three parters of The Royal Albion lifted above the grates.

I think a chordal structure is common in the way we string tones together to create a melody. Even Ben Franklin had some words on the subject regards to Scottish music.

This could become a doctoral thesis so I thank you for the point to ponder. But excuse me if I think you are a little off base.

Don

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 09:07 AM

To Eric the Red: I won't use your language, but I don't know much about chords and polyphony, because I'm a folkie who just plays and sings the top-line melody, with recorders and keyboards. I've been able to read such top-lines for some time now but am only just getting to the point where I can mimic my singing with these instruments - i.e., write music.
To Marje - I've placed in a few folk-festivals and, if you bothered to look, have received some more-positive Comments on that same, above, Space.
Love, WAV

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Marje
Date: 03 May 08 - 08:06 AM

Having clicked on the link, I see what you mean, Eric. I won't be joining that particular queue.

Marje

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 03 May 08 - 07:19 AM

It's widely accepted that WalkaboutsVerse knows jack shit about music,
or verse.

eric

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 07:10 AM

"I shouldn't think there will be many queuing up to hear your performances" CS...myspace should give you some idea of that (being the weekend, there's an English hymn atop at the moment).

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: GUEST,Captain Swing
Date: 03 May 08 - 06:49 AM

That's fair enough Santa.

To me, traditional material is a blank canvas with no definitives. (Dylan's music is a bit like this too.) That's one of the beauties of this music. You can develop it as you please but communication is paramount.

WAV, your attitude detracts from this. I shouldn't think there will be many queuing up to hear your performances.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 06:10 AM

That's what I said, Marje "English folk-music, for centuries, has entertained folks, with telling &/or dancing, via the repetition of relatively simple TUNES." (me)...polyphony and chords were found, rather, in church and court..? (Early hymns and chants were just a single-line, too, with, usaully three, other lines added by later composers.)

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Marje
Date: 03 May 08 - 05:56 AM

You've lost me now, by referring to Joseph Taylor. A solo singer without accompaniment is, by definition, singing only a melody line. He can't sing harmony because he's on his own. People didn't use guitars to accompany traditional songs in Joseph Taylor's day, so what do you expect except unaccompanied melody?

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 03 May 08 - 05:54 AM

As I've said in verse, when people lose their OWN culture, society suffers, Santa.

Subject: RE: Chords in Folk?
From: Santa
Date: 03 May 08 - 05:44 AM

"Can someone tell me why it matters how things were done in the past?"

Because it is interesting in itself. That should be sufficient reason, but if you need more, then because it is a guide to what works, and continued to work for many generations. This form of the music continues to envelop the listeners who enjoy such. As for other forms tried out today or whenever, whether you call it adaption or development, this extends the form but does not necessarily replace it. The pop protest singers of the 60s and the folk-rock of the 70s extended folk music, but did not replace earlier forms. The good will be kept, the bad dropped, but the older forms will continue.