What's so special about F. J. Child?

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: IanC
Date: 22 Jul 03 - 12:05 PM

Nerd

(a) I blieve all those things are essentially true. I don't regard that as denigration, though I admit I deliberately stated them quite baldly in order to get a response. Some of the responses were excellent. Others were little more than knee jerk reactions.

(b) You'll have noted that I quoted Harker as my source and so you can check what he said, and confirm its truth or otherwise. If it's not so, then good ... if we all provided the source of our evidence, it would be easier to have a decent debate.

:-)

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: GUEST,Q
Date: 22 Jul 03 - 02:00 PM

"Bitter Withy- Mary Mild" may be considered to be a folk song or ballad now, but, as Malcolm Douglas noted (thread 55114), in its form it could be from the "homolectic chapbooks from early 19th century." It appeared in a book of carols in 1836.
If Malcolm is correct, it certainly deserved no place in Child's compilation.

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: GUEST,Q
Date: 22 Jul 03 - 03:21 PM

Wilfried, thanks for the notes on Erk's publications. I would like to have a volume of older German folksongs, and was wondering which one would be a good choice.

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: Art Thieme
Date: 22 Jul 03 - 04:22 PM

Child, for me, was simply an easy way to reference the ballad I was singing or referring to or teaching about. Listeners could then go to his good collection and find that ballad and similar songs that were also stanzaic and told other quite interesting stories. Telling others that "This is Child Number 11" was a way of intimating that we were talking about a certain kind of song. The Child references we made were good ones-----handy ones. The collection was scholarly to a point, or so it seemed, and rather encompassing of the whole ballad idea.

Once again, those who are denegrating the man from here in 2003 were not there in the 1950s and 1960s and cannot or will not see why we, then, looked to Mr. Child as a standard and a standard bearer. Once again, that is quite sad. It is even sadder than those who, today, call everything folk. But it is no less wrong headed.

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 23 Jul 03 - 02:59 AM

Guest Q -

Both works are still advertised in the "Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher" [the German Books in Print].

Erk, Ludwig / Böhme, Franz M
Deutscher Liederhort
ISBN :         3-487-04443-9
Seiten/Umfang : LXXII, 2376 Seiten [3 vols.]
Erschienen :         1988
Preisinfo : 258,00 Eur[D] / 265,30 Eur[A] (unverb. Preisempfehlung)

Erk, Ludwig / Irmer, Wilhelm
Die deutschen Volkslieder mit ihren Singweisen
ISBN 3-487-07240-8
99,80 Eur[D] / 102,60 Eur[A] (unverb. Preisempfehlung)

You don't find them in amazon.com. In the German branch amazon.de you can order used editions, if available.

Naturally it is also a question of price, but I strongly recommend the "Liederhort" with its 3 vols., it covers the whole range of German folk songs.

If you are not so much interested in scientific research but only want a smaller collection of fine old folk songs, I strongly recommend an old companion of my hiking days:
Der Zupfgeigenhansl : Das Liederbuch der Wandervögel. - Herausgegeben von Hans Breuer. - Mainz : Schott, 1988. - 255 S., Abb.
ISBN 3-7957-8219-8
14,00 sFr / 7,61 Eur[D] / 7,90 Eur[A] (unverb. Preisempfehlung)

Wilfried

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: Nerd
Date: 23 Jul 03 - 04:30 AM

You're confused, GUEST Q. What Malcolm said was:

It wouldn't be at all surprising if On Christmas Day derived from the homilectic chapbooks that circulated widely in the earlier part of the 19th century; as, it appears, did The Holy Well, whatever its antecedents may have been.

Malcolm thus did not attribute The Bitter Withy to a nineteenth century chapbook, but The Holy Well, a similar but different song, and On Christmas Day, a totally different song.

I don't know what you mean by "in its form" it could be from that era, though...

Its appearance in an 1836 book of carols is likewise irrelevant; The Cherry Tree Carol, St. Stephen and Herod, etc, are considered both ballads and carols, and Child included them in his collection. So just because it was in the book of carols there would be no reason for Child to exclude it.

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: GUEST,Q
Date: 23 Jul 03 - 12:29 PM

Slipped a few cogs in my recollection of what Child included; there are a couple considered to be 'carols'.

However, the song grouping Bitter Withy, Holy Well (Sandy, 1833) and Mary Mild (lumped together by Bruce O) don't seem to have any history before 1833, and Bitter Withy didn't show up until a 1905 collection, according to several threads on this group. Malcolm did refer to the Holy Well, but the three (and more titles?) are all from the same dough and seem to have no history before the 19th century, thus would not deserve a place with the ballads.

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: IanC
Date: 24 Jul 03 - 09:10 AM

Q

The 1905 date probably came from The Traditional Ballad Index. This can be misleading as it is the earlies date for a publication that the editors have read themselves. The ballad(/carol) has had rather less attention the The Cherry Tree Carol as it isn't a Christmas carol and therefore doesn't fit so well into a lot of collections.

A. L. Lloyd, in his sleeve notes to The Watersons' Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy says it was available in chapbooks during the 1840s. Though he may be a bit enthusiastic at times, he doesn't usually invent chapbooks.

Folk hymns don't always reflect the views of the vicarage. Since the Middle Ages poor people have interpreted the Gospel legends and characters to suit themselves. In the Cherry Tree Carol, Joseph is a grumpy peasant suspecting that he has been cuckolded (he says to Mary: 'Let him gather thee cherries that put thee with child'). In The Bitter Withy the far-from-gentle-Jesus drastically brings down the pride of the uppish young lords, and gets his bottom smacked for his pains. This carol, more vengeful than pious, lasted particularly well in the West Midlands, perhaps under the inspiration of chapbook copies published in Birmingham in the 1840's.

BruceO may well be able to give us information about earlier copies.

:-)

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 24 Jul 03 - 01:59 PM

I don't have anything new on the ballads IanC mentioned above.

Don Firth, I was at UW in 1958 (and I think Sandy Patone was around, too) but I never heard of Prof. David Fowler until later. But at that time my knowledge of folk songs didn't go much beyond Burl Ives and Ivar Hagland.

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: Don Firth
Date: 24 Jul 03 - 03:17 PM

Hi, Bruce O. We probably saw each other around, but who knew? Did you ever hang out between classes at Howard's Restaurant or the Coffee Corral on The Ave?

An aside and a bit of thread creep:— I don't know what all Prof. David C. Fowler taught, but two of his more interesting courses were "The Popular Ballad" and "The Bible as Literature." He was in the papers a couple of times when one or two churches in the Redmond area (sometimes lovingly referred to as the "Redmond Rednecks") raised hell about the University of Washington letting one of its professors "teach religion." Prof. Fowler made no religious interpretations during the course and, in fact, discouraged any actual religious discussions in class. He treated the Bible as a group of short stories, novellas, and poems, and we talked about it in those terms. I think the big objection these churches had to the course was that we didn't deal with disconnected individual verses, we read whole books all the way through. Then, when someone tried to bamboozle anybody who had taken the course by quoting verses out of context, we could haul the discussion back on track, put the verses back in context, and wax eloquent on what the quoted verses really meant. In short, reading it the way we did for the class, we wound up knowing too much about what the Bible said. They wanted to get the class pulled, but as I recall, the U. of W. backed Prof. Fowler all the way. Heck of a good teacher all around.

Sandy Paton. He was living in Seattle when I first got interested in folk music around 1952. I knew him for about a year or so, then he left for back East. He came back in summer of 1954, then left again as fall approached. I particularly remember a big "going away" party. Lots of singing. Next time I saw Sandy (sort of) was when I was pawing through the folk music records at Campus Music and Gallery and suddenly there was Sandy smiling up at me from the cover of "Many Sides of Sandy Paton." This was about 1958. He had been to the British Isles since last I'd heard. Then I ran into him at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Festival where he was one of the featured performers. A couple of good gab-fests. He dragged me off to a party, and after we'd been there for a few minutes, in walked Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, who were also featured performers at the festival. Lots of amazing singing that night, too. Haven't seen him since, though, although we've e-mailed a bit.

Just thought I'd toss that in. Okay, back to F. J. Child.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: GUEST
Date: 24 Jul 03 - 03:46 PM

Don, I was a grad student in the Chem Dept. then, and the Coffee Corral was the closet place to get something to eat, after the Student Union bldg. closed for the night. The Coffee Corral lost one of their good waitresses when a fellow grad student married her. Lorainne was my favourite waitress there, however.

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 24 Jul 03 - 03:55 PM

Don, I really meant to sign that last one. Force of habit is hard to break. Incidently, I'm from Bremerton, and one of my sisters recently moved back there (vicinity, that is. I lived in places all around the town, but never in it).

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: Don Firth
Date: 24 Jul 03 - 04:09 PM

Lorainne. That rings a small bell. . . .

I was actually fairly easy to pick out in a crowd. I had polio when I was 2 years old, and I walked with a brace on my right leg and with a pair of aluminum forearm crutches. Sometimes seen lugging a guitar case. Spent most of my time on campus in the Music Building and Parrington Hall. Between classes at Howard's mostly, but often at the Coffee Corral.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 24 Jul 03 - 04:14 PM

That crutches rings a small bell, too, but sorry, I can't pin a face to it, yet.

Subject: RE: What's so special about F. J. Child?
From: Art Thieme
Date: 26 Jul 03 - 06:53 PM

Don and Bruce,

Wish I'd run into you two out on my folk road somewhere along the way. It sounds like that'd've been a blast. I too was getting to know Sandy back in those other times.

Art Thieme