the last true folk song

Subject: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,kathy
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 10:48 AM

i was at a concert last night and one of the performers said that real folk songs were created anonymously through the folk process.

it seems to me that in the 20th century, with radio, recordings, mass media, etc., the folk process of anonymous creation has disappeared. we know, or can find, the identities of the composers of all recent songs.

so, my question is, what was the last true folk song created anonymously through the folk process?

thanks.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 10:57 AM

The performer you heard was over-simplifying!  This is a question which it is quite impossible to answer.  Now let's sit back and see what happens...

Malcolm

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: MMario
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 10:59 AM

but - we DO NOT know all the composers of recent songs. or at least the people performing songs do not necessarily know the composers or derivations. I know of at least two or three songs that I have heard performed and attributed to "traditional/anonymous" that I know were composed within the last few years(and I know who composed them). The folk process is alive and well; there are differences, but I think you will find that the folk process will continue wherever there is singing. I suspect (though there is probably no way to know) that many of the tradtional folk songs we know today were the "filk" of their own day. we KNOW that political satires were set to popular tunes; gee, that continues today.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: MMario
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 11:01 AM

oh - and for another couple of cents worth - especially when you staft talking parodies and filk - which is where I think you will see "future folk" derive from; there are often multiple claimants to the authorship of a song which is only a few years old. "Ownership" gets real muddy real fast.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,kathy
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 11:07 AM

mmario said: "but - we DO NOT know all the composers of recent songs. or at least the people performing songs do not necessarily know the composers or derivations. I know of at least two or three songs that I have heard performed and attributed to "traditional/anonymous" that I know were composed within the last few years(and I know who composed them)."

you see, that proves my initial point. the collective "we" does know who wrote the songs in question. the fact that you knew the identities of the composers just says that the performers in question did sloppy (or no) research before their performance.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: MMario
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 11:20 AM

actually - it would have been very very hard for them to have learned who the composer was. and the speed of transmission of songs is MUCH greater then the speed of transmission of authorship.

But you know what? I bet when a lot of traditional folk songs first came on the scene that people THEN knew who had developed the song. and the information got lost, just as the information gets lost today.

nothing stops folk song from being created today. The names attributed to many songs could very well be wrong, and are disputed in many more cases. - even within bands I have heard authorship being disputed.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Rick Fielding
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 11:21 AM

It's a good question Kathy, but the area is so grey...and the topic so interesting to some of us, that we've spent virtually our whole lives discussing and arguing it's finer points. Other than the fact that we have more information available to us now (thanks to dedicated researchers) we're no closer to real answers.

A little story that I got a chuckle out of:

A friend of mine's grandfather was a noted Cape Breton traditional singer. He sang many songs for collectors. One of his favourite songs apparently had never been heard before, and the folksong collector eagerly played the recording for her like-minded friends. They were impressed. It was a couple of years later when a decidedly NON-folkie heard the recording and pointed out to her that her "undiscovered folk song" was actually from a 1920s Broadway show!

It all depends on what circles you run in.

Rick

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Midchuck
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 11:27 AM

The last true folk song up to now is probably being composed as I write this, by some inner-city elementary school kids playing jumprope, or a bunch of bored soldiers sitting around a barracks with a guitar or two....

Peter.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,Russ
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 11:54 AM

What the performer stated as fact is, in fact, simply one of several competing theories about the origin of music we now call "folk." I am not a professional folklorist, so I don't know how popular the theory is these days or even if it is still taken seriously among professionals.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Jeri
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 11:56 AM

Peter - bingo! Kids still create songs, blissfully unaware of copyright laws and recording contracts. Re the soldiers sitting around barracks - could be. Mainly it's the ones marching around outside. New cadences crop up all the time, or new words to old tunes. I would have loved to have had a tape recorder with me in Kuwait in '98. Then again, the Army guys sang when they went on their morning runs, and I wasn't about to jog after them carrying a tape recorder...

My $.02: The reason knowing the author of a song makes it not a folk song is that people will most likely stick to the author's original lyrics. When the song gets into the oral tradition, author unknown, it can change. It can do this even if it's just a few people who don't know who the author is. For example, Ewan McColl's "Shoals of Herring" - there are a few versions of that one.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Hollowfox
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 01:36 PM

Midchuck, ya beat me to it!(good job). My thought was that it was (the latest one, at least) created on the playground, and that it's funny, rude, ceude, and not at all what that performer had in mind.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,Sarah
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 03:13 PM

So, by this performers's definition, what Woody wrote isn't folk music?

The guy was talking through his hat. Or elsewhere.

Sarah

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Luke
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 03:23 PM

There never was a last one. There is only the one you need to make or gets made up on the spot to say a time and a thing that happened or is happening right now. Folk music is about being a container that carries a little bit of time in it as it gets used again and again. It brings time with it when it comes and it stops time momentarily til it's done. One also gives it more time when one uses it.

I love it,

Luke

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 03:30 PM

Sarah's comment is maybe just a little unfair; what the performer was doing was repeating the definition of folk music generally accepted by the scholars and collectors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  As research has accumulated, so that definition has largely been modified; anonymity is usually no longer considered, per se, as a prerequisite for a piece to be considered "folk music".  What nobody can do, however (despite the record industry's best efforts to pretend otherwise) is write a folk song.  A song can become a folksong through the process of repeated transmission, but this does take time.  Some of Guthrie's songs have already attained this status, others (so far) have not.  Of course, people who believe that more or less anything played with an acoustic guitar is somehow "folk music" would disagree with me quite strongly.

Malcolm

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 03:31 PM

Whoops, forgot to turn off the italics...

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Jeri
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 03:59 PM

I don't want to get into a discussion of "what is folk" again. The original questions asked, given this context, what is the last folk song. I know some folks are gonna forget about the question and argue what they want to, but I will at least try to stick to talking about oral tradition.

Anyway, if anonynmity were required, let's define THAT term. Ask a bunch of people down at the local market "who wrote 'This Land Is Your Land'." My guess is that to most of them, the author would be unknown. I wonder if Woody Guthrie would have called his songs folk songs...

It's also quite possible that a song getting into the oral tradition has more to do with it than the name of the author. If a person learns a song from hearing it, and passes it on by singing it to someone, the name of the author wouldn't be much of a factor.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: MMario
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 04:15 PM

thanks jeri - that what I was trying to say way back up above....

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 04:42 PM

"Dr. Seuss" wrote a song called "Uncle Terwilliger Waltzes with Bears," but the popular song, "Waltzing with Bears" (which is in DT), although obviously derived from it, is quite different.

"Banjo" Paterson wrote "Waltzing Matilda," but it too has gone through some changes to become the song we are familiar with today.

I'm sure other Mudcatters can think of other examples. My point is, just because the original writer of a song is known, that doesn't mean the folk process will leave it alone. And once the folk process has done its work, I think it's proper to call it a folk song.

Kids are always making up parodies: "Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg."

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,Sarah
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 08:11 PM

Well, Malcolm, being in complete and utter non-awe of "scholars and collectors", I'll have to disagree with the definition anyway, as well as the premise that no one can deliberately write a folk song. I think people write folk songs all the time, or try to. Seems to me that the defining authority is being sought at the wrong end of the process: It isn't whether so-and-so wrote a song or found it back in the Trad Anon collection; what makes a song a folk song in my book is whether folks who hear it want to sing it. They're the folks; they should know.

Sarah

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 08:28 PM

GUEST Sarah:

The key words in your post are "or try to". People write songs what we might call "in the folk tradition" all the time, and folks will end up liking some of them well enough to sing them and pass them along without respect to where they came from or whether they're repeated exactly as they originally were, or lose something in transmission, or are improved in transmission.

Now those new songs "in the folk tradition", if we may call them that, are not folk songs at that point. This takes nothing away from the value, meaning, singability, or dignity of that new song. If people DO want to sing them, as you suggest, and do in fact sing them and pass them along, maybe (probably) modify them, then that's when you call them a folk song: At that point they belong to the folk.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,Sarah
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 08:37 PM

DaveO:

Exactly; I still can't see that knowing the author nullifies a song's authenticity.

Sarah

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,Art Thieme (Edgar A.)
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 08:43 PM

Jeri,

You may not wish to get into a discussion of "what is folk music?" again---but here we are. It's jus tsilly to say that the tradition has nothing to do with what a folksong is. To say that the emperor is clothed when in reality he is not is like saying the world is flat.

DUNE is on in five minutes. I'm gonna go watch it.

Art

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 08:46 PM

I certainly was quite specific in saying that anonymity is no longer considered a necessary qualification, and has not been for some time.  Sarah's comment is a clear demonstration of why I said, in the second post of this thread, that the question was unanswerable; a discussion at this level will never even approach a consensus on a provisional definition of "folkmusic"; clearly Sarah and I have a quite different understanding of the term.  For myself, I would be inclined to place greater trust, when looking for a workable overview, in people who have spent time studying the subject, rather than in those who have an indefinable "gut feeling", but who don't actually know very much about it; just as I would rather go to -for example- a physiotherapist who had had some training, instead of one who knew that people have bones and muscles, and who felt that, since they too have bones and muscles, their opinion must be equally as valid.  It's important to remember that carriers of traditional folksong rarely define their repertoire as "folksong", unless they think that it's expected of them; people who do describe themselves as "folksingers" or, more contentiously, as "writers of folksong", tend to do it for aspirational or commercial reasons.

Malcolm

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,Sarah
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 09:16 PM

I'll certainly agree that we have a different understanding. I do think comparing any music, or the study thereof, to a branch of medical science is a bit far-fetched, much as comparing Theology and Subtraction. But perhaps that just underlines the differences of understanding. Whatever enhances your enjoyment, I suppose.

Sarah

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 09:34 PM

The comparison is of little relevance in itself; though I chose that particular analogy in order to emphasise that an opinion is best based on informed understanding, which anyone who considers the research done in the past to be irrelevant is unlikely to have.

Malcolm

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: GUEST,Sarah
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 10:10 PM

I don't discount researchers, nor historians -- nor would I discount people in general and the "gut feeling" you seem to distrust. Contrariwise, I wouldn't put my faith in the pronouncements of someone on the basis of a sheepskin, or even of current acclaim, but would rather use them to further my own research. Scholars have been known to be wrong, too -- and to disagree in their conclusions.

Sarah

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 05 Dec 00 - 10:17 PM

At which point, we seem to be in agreement, more or less.  That suits me.  After our diversion, does anyone have anything to add to the original question?

Malcolm

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: The Shambles
Date: 06 Dec 00 - 12:02 AM

The last true folk song has yet to be written.

Then it will go through the process until the next one is written.

The process is continous, tradional and even older than some of our contributors.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Alice
Date: 06 Dec 00 - 12:20 AM

tonight, adolescent girls and boys writing songs about their first heart break, parents making up a lullaby, kids on hands and knees playing with toys as they make up words and tunes.... and on, and on.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 06 Dec 00 - 07:07 PM

I doubt that the last folk song has been written.

My definition is a song that the "folk" continue to sing/play/remember/change.

Early days it was news, group get to gethers, and such things. Nowadays we have moved into a more technical area, so can we not say that a song that moves among masses and is then repeated around this planet is a "folk song"? Think of Woody Guthrie/Phil Ochs/Dylan/ et al. These songs have become part of the fabric of the world. What could be more folk----please don't say Sinatra.

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: The Shambles
Date: 07 Dec 00 - 02:06 AM

Sinatra.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: The Shambles
Date: 07 Dec 00 - 02:08 AM

Like Woody, Dylan and Phil, he did quite a lot politically too, so I hear?

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: rabbitrunning
Date: 07 Dec 00 - 04:28 AM

If you define folk songs, narrowly, as "anonymous songs with variants," you could probably start a fun game of "knock this song off the list." with people lining up to prove that this song or the other was written by so-and-so there and then. Last song on the list wins.

It wouldn't be a particularly useful game, but it might be fun. **grin**

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: Ira
Date: 07 Dec 00 - 11:19 PM

Folk songs, even those that are not anonymous, evolve. Very often the original referents are meaningless to a new generation of singers, so they change the songs.

For example, Ewan MacColl write a song about the Spring Hill, Nova Scotia coal mine disaster. In the song he refers to "bare-faced miners". If you don't know the specific meaning of this phrase in context ( rescue workers who take the risk of going down without a gas mask in order to extend their working time), it seems strange and many later singers render it as "black-faced miners"

As long as new singers learn from the singing of others, rather than from books, the folk process will continue.

Subject: RE: the last true folk song
From: blt
Date: 07 Dec 00 - 11:35 PM

This has such a taoist quality to it, as if simply by talking about folk music or singing a song, it isn't the real folk song we're singing. I change other people's lyrics all the time, I just forget a certain lyric and say something to fill the space, or I learn off of someone's tape and misunderstand a word. My understanding of Woody Guthrie's oft-repeated quote is that folksingers naturally steal things like tunes and lyrics. To me, the phrase the "last true folk song" is an oxymoron--and it seems (again, just my perspective) a bit short-sighted to believe all of us aren't in the folk process continually, like stones being tumbled about by the sea. I'm not sure we have much choice in the matter, to be honest.