Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?

Subject: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: GUEST,Jeff
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 04:32 AM

OK, I guess that we all know the (in)famous quote:

"All music is folk music, I ain't ever heard a horse sing."

I'm curious to know who said it first. The main contenders appear to be Big Bill Broonzy and Louis Armstrong, although I've seen it credited to others too.

Anyone know?

Jeff

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: greg stephens
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 04:51 AM

This is a very interesting question, I wish I knew the answer.I've always thought of it as a Louis Armstrong quote, because that's who it was attributed to when I first heard it. There's a recent posting by someone or other that mentions a 1959 recording of Big Bill Broonzy saying it at a concert, so there's a start pointfor the discussion...anybody got an earlierdate? I'm pretty sure I read it in a book about jazz pulished pre-l959, but I can't find the book on my shelves so that's it as far as i'm coverned.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Mr Red
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 07:19 AM

We are talking documented quotes aren't we?
I heard it as BBB & LA but I have heard it said of Buddy Bolden who was pre 20's I believe.
The problem is going to be who is quoting who?
Do the Lomaxes have this quote in their tome? That would date it 1933 on publication alone.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: pict
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 07:47 AM

I thought it was Woody Guthrie.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 07:54 AM

Adam, but originally it was "I've never heard a snake sing."

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Watson
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 08:03 AM

This seems always to be attributed to Louis Armstrong, but in a quick search of the www, the only dated references are from his obit in the New York Times

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Steve Parkes
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 08:11 AM

It's been attributed in this forum to Big Bill Broonzy--and probably others too.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: GUEST,Mr. Ed
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 08:15 AM

It was said by Big Bill Broonzy in an interview with Studs Terkel on WFMT in Chicago in 1955.

Of course of course I proved him wrong when I got my TV show.

Wilbur says hi.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: GUEST,greg stephens
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 08:16 AM

I think McGrath is placing it a bit early by going back to Adam. The quote must have arisen after an active debate on "what is folk music" had started, which I think rules out Adam, and also Buddy Bolden.I wouldn't have thought the term "folk music" was in use in New Orleans in 1900(or in the rest of the English speaking world). A.L Lloyd in "Folk song in England" makes an important point when he refers to "Louis Armstrong's dreary axiom" (with a footnote saying maybe it wasn't Louis Armstrong's). It really doesn't matter much who said it (though it would be very interesting to know): it does matter that this dreary bit of clever-dickery

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: GUEST,greg stephens
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 08:21 AM

(sorry got cut off in mid-rant)..that this dreary bit of clever-dickery should be used to stifle discussion on what is quite an interesting (if done to death) topic: is there a difference between Bach and Spice Girls on the one hand, and "John Henry" and "Searching for Lambs" on the other? And if so, what is it?No, I don't want to restart that discussion here, merely to register an ongoing protest at the horse line.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Watson
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 08:30 AM

The clever dickery has been noted on uk.music.folk as well.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Don Firth
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 12:35 PM

I'm currently a short way into Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music by Benjamin Filene, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2000. Benjamin Filene, a cultural historian with the Minnesota Historical Society, has obviously done his homework and he gives some pretty interesting insights into why "folk song" is so hard to define. The lack of definition that we seem to be stuck with comes pretty much as a result of the different preconceptions that the major collectors and compilers such as Child, Sharp, and the Lomaxes held, further compounded (confounded?) by record company executives and promoters back in the Twenties and Thirties trying to make a buck from their new categories of "race" and "hillbilly" music.

The first person on record to use the expression "folk song" (volkslieder) was German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (late eighteenth century). Von Herder was referring to music of the rural peasant class. But "rural peasant class" is not politically correct in this day and age, nor is it necessarily applicable to the modern world, so his definition just won't do anymore. Percy and Scott were collecting "ancient poetry." They tended to tidy up what they considered "crude" or "illiterate." Child seemed to think that there was no American folk music other than modern corruptions of ancient British songs and that anything much after the fourteenth century was adulterated by modern influences. He was very selective (a monumental and exceedingly valuable achievement, nonetheless). Sharp was looking for his romantic concept of the pastoral England of two centuries ago and thought he'd found it in the Southern Appalachians. His informants sang a lot of stuff to him that he didn't take down, because he didn't regard it as "authentic." So he, too, was very selective (but he did take down the tunes). The Lomaxes were looking for living, breathing examples of folk singers (in Leadbelly, they thought they'd found the Holy Grail)—and then coached them on how to be "authentic." And—blasphemy alert!!—our usually accepted canon of authenticity, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music is a compilation of commercial records from the Twenties and Thirties.

I'm only a couple chapters into the book, but it's absolutely fascinating and highly enlightening. Obviously, folk music is the proverbial elephant, and everyone else, including the "experts," are blind gropers. Whenever the "horse" schtick comes up, it's a tip-off that someone's trying to toss in a ringer. But just because trying to define "folk song" is like trying to nail Jello to the wall doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 12:40 PM

But, Don Firth, I never hear an ELEPHANT sing!

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: IanC
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 12:47 PM

Don

When you've got past that one, try Dave Harker's "Fakesong". When you get past the Marxist dialectial materialist approach, it's full of excellent stuff.

:-)
Ian

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Jacob B
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 12:53 PM

And besides, I don't WANT Jello nailed to my walls.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Stephen L. Rich
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 01:17 PM

I've never heard it attributed to anyone except Broonzy. But, that may, simply, be a result of having grown up in Chicago.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Don Firth
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 01:23 PM

Well, Dave, you can never tell what an elephant's liabel to do when you're groping him.

Thanks, IanC. I'll give it a shot.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 09:46 PM

Anyway, horses do sing, and so do elephants.

Though the quote gets overused and misused, I take it as a way of rejecting the kind of picking and choosing that Cecil Sharp practiced when he decided only some of the repertoire of his singers counted.

It's really a way of saying "I am going to sing the songs I want to sing, and when I sing them they are the same kind of songs wherever they came from." It shouldn't be taken as a way of pretending there aren't distinctions to be made, but rather of denying that these distinctions should be used as limits mechanically imposed on what we do.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 11:59 PM

Broonzy certainly said it--it's on one of his recordings. I suspect that whoever said it first (and every time subsequently) was in a discussion of What is Folksong and was too lazy to think about a real answer.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Mark Ross
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 12:42 AM

I've also seen it attributed to Brownie McGhee.

Mark Ross

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 01:39 AM

Folk singer- 1884. Folk song- 1847 (According to Webster's Collegiate.) But older- see Firth, above.

Let's get some more quotations in here.
"All good folk music is as international as the story of Jack the Giant Killer." George Bernard Shaw, 1889.

Krebiel, 1903: "Folksong is not popular song in the sense in which the word is most frequently used, but the song of the folk; not only the song of the people but, in a strict sense, the song created by the people. It is a body of poetry and music which has come into existence without the influence of concious art, as a spontaneous utterance, filled with characteristics of rhythm, form and melody which are traceable, more or less clearly, to racial (or national) temperament, modes of life, climatic and political conditions, geographical environment and language. Some of these elements, the spiritual, are elusive, but others can be determined and classified."
"All music is folk music; I ain't never heard a horse sing" is one of those facetious remarks that the speaker, whoever he was, probably regretted the next day.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 10:16 AM

"...and perhaps, the horse will learn to sing..."

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 10:28 AM

I'd be surprised at anyone who's spent much time around horses thinking they can't sing, in a horsy way.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Don Firth
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 12:29 PM

Dunno when he said it exactly, but Von Herder's dates are 1744 to 1803. In 1778 he published a group of songs he had collected in what is now Latvia. The title of the book was Volkslieder. Von Herder felt that the Kulture des Volkes could inject a bit of life into what he considered the general intellectual stuffiness of the age.

Dicho, I particularly like the Krebiel quote. It works for me.

But when it comes to singing, I reserve the right to sing anything my fancy turns to. The vast majority of my repertoire consists of traditional songs, but I also sing a few poems set to music. I have also done stuff like They Call the Wind Mariah and Try to Remember (but only on request and not for years). Whenever I do things like that, I always mention to the audience that this is not a traditional song, it comes from (wherever). I'm currently working on a song by Eric Idle, and I'm toying with the idea of learning an operatic aria: Deh, vieni alla finestra from Mozart's Don Giovanni. It's a serenade, and it's usually accompanied by a mandolin, but a very nice guitar accompaniment can be worked out for it. Folk song? I don't think so.

Why is it so important that everything we sing be a folk song?

Do horses sing? Well, having not been around horses that much, who am I to say "neigh?"

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 12:54 PM

Should have given references for the Krebiel quote. It has appeared several times, first in "The Musical Guide," Hughes (ed.) 1903, then in Krebiel, I. E., 1914, Afro-American Folksongs, A Study in Racial and National Music. I found it in Paul Oliver, 1968, Screening the Blues.
The Shaw quote is from the OED in their definitions of "Folk-."
As Don Firth says, singers should sing what pleases them, regardless of definitions. Only if they like what they sing will they be able to catch up an audience. Song introductions should be as accurate as possible, but if the singer dunno, he should say that, not blame that poor old fellow Trad Ishunal.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: greg stephens
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 04:18 PM

I dont think even the most diehard folkies ever disapproved of people singing non-folksongs. They only ever applied their efforts to keeping the repertoire in folk clubs vaguely folk-orientated. Not very odd or fascistic really. There's a Pigeon Fanciers Club meets near here: while they might not mind if I took round my bird-of-paradise occasionally, I doubt if they'd want to be taken over completely.

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Hrothgar
Date: 24 Apr 02 - 04:42 AM

I've heard the rear end of a horse singing folk songs. Does that count?

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Stephen L. Rich
Date: 24 Apr 02 - 05:08 AM

Only if they're getting paid for it. :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 24 Apr 02 - 08:46 AM

Horse drift. But the end quote seems apposite...

From today's Guardian Diary:

A Newsweek piece on the CIA in Afghanistan reveals that the agency performs well up to its own standards. "Supplies meant for the Alpha or Bravo team sometimes land on the Echo or Foxtrot team," the magazine reports. "Last fall, one frustrated spook, hiding at a secret drop zone near Kandahar, sent this coded message: 'waited three hours through all possible windows: only one airplane passed and kicked off one bundle: some bags of beans and rice and two bags of horse feed, rpt horse feed. We do not have any fucking horses.'"

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Don Firth
Date: 25 Apr 02 - 05:48 PM

After following this thread for the last few days, I could hardly believe my ears.

Yesterday afternoon on KUOW-FM (the local NPR affiliate) one of the local announcer/interviewers, Marci Silman, interviewed Nick Spitzter, host of American Routes. Spitzer, it seems, is in town. Ordinarily I like Marci Silman, but early in the interview Spitzer mentioned that he has a degree in folklore. Marci responded, "Folklore? You have a degree in folklore? I didn't know you could get a degree in folklore!" I sez to myself, "Great, Marci! Why don't you pee on the man's profession right there on the air?" After my initial surprise, I figured, "Okay, I think this is gonna hurt!" I was right. A moment or two later, she asked Spitzer, "Just what is folk music, anyway?" And putting the onus on Louis Armstrong, Spitzer trotted out that goddam horse again!!

. . . And weeping and wailing shall be heard throughout the land. . . .

Not to mention strains of "Old Uncle Tom Cobblers and all!"

The rest of the interview was okay, though. Spitzer is giving a lecture on the U. of W. campus, then doing something at the Experience Music Project over at the Seattle Center.

Don Firth
(I'm afraid I'm turning into a bitter old man!

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: Bill D
Date: 25 Apr 02 - 07:02 PM

". . . And weeping and wailing shall be heard throughout the land. . . . "

...and MUCH gnashing of teeth!

Subject: RE: BS: Folk Songs / Horses. Who said it?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 25 Apr 02 - 08:01 PM

The core of truth in it is that anything sung by Bill Broonzy (for example), would in the process of passing through the man, take on some of the elements of folk music that makes us value it.