"What makes it a folk song"
Its origins for a start – it came from 'the folk' – it was made and adapted by people described in George Ewart Evans' 'Ask the Fellow Who Cuts the Hay', or George Sturt's 'The Betsworth Book', or George Bourne's 'Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer', or 'When I Was A Child' by 'An Old Potter'. Or those more academically discussed in George Laurence Gomme's 'The Village Community'. The songs are part of their culture and their history – and of ours. It was how they saw themselves – not the view of an outsider, but one from the horse's (not the singing one's) mouth.
Don't believe me?
Listen to the Lomax recording of Harry Cox singing 'Betsy the Serving Maid' (son of a well-heeled family falls in love with a servant-girl – family have her shipped out to America – son dies of grief). At the end of the singing Cox spits out, "And that's what the buggers thought of us".
In the same session he sings 'Van Dieman's Land', then goes into a diatribe about local landlords who seized and enclosed the land, thus depriving land labourers of taking the odd hare or pheasant to fortify the pot that fed their hungry families.
Not the ranting of a bleeding-hearted liberal or leftie, but that of a land labourer assessing his position in the pecking order and using his songs to do it.
We came across it all the time - from Walter Pardon, who located many of his songs in the fields surrounding his home in North Norfolk, or from Travellers who would sing you a centuries-old ballad and tell you "That was a song made by a Traveller, about what happened to his grandfather". We were told of the rather mawkish 'Banks of the Lee', "she was a Travelling girl who died in a workhouse fire while her husband was working away".
When we first started recording here in West Clare we were being given dozens upon dozens of emigration songs – I have to say, to my shame I dreaded them… "Oh no, not another one of those bloody 'why did I leave dear old Ireland' dirges". Then we realised that there isn't a family in this area which hadn't lost members to the emigrations, and that these songs were an acknowledgement of that fact. We had described to us a local Christmas party where the elderly father sang 'The Christmas Letter' to a family in floods of tears, remembering brothers and sisters who had gone off to America or Canada, or Australia, and never made it back.
IMO, these songs were made, not just as an entertainment, but as an affirmation of who they/we are, where we came from (my own family, on both sides, left Ireland in the 1840s to escape the results of a lethally mismanaged famine).
I believe the making of these songs stopped when we all acquired televisions and became recipients rather than creators of our culture and our entertainment. It doesn't mean that we can't go on singing the songs, or creating new ones using the (very accessible) forms of composition – in fact, it would be a god-awful waste not to do so. But we also need to recognise that what we do today is different than what has gone before.
By lumping together the modern compositions heard in folk clubs, no matter how worthy, with those of the anonymous farm labourers, mill workers, seamen, soldiers, miners…. whoever, is, to me, debasing and distorting the coin.
This is doubly true of songs like 'Leader of the Pack' and '24 Hours From Tulsa, the wares of a cynical and avaricious music industry, designed to be milked for what they are worth in the short term, then discarded when there is nothing more to be had from them.
Jim Carroll