The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #126095   Message #4022634
Posted By: Jack Campin
07-Dec-19 - 12:15 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Conversation songs between man and woman
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Conversation songs between man and woman
A Hungarian one. There are many versions of it, both for words and tune: this one is from Moldavia.

Elment a madarka

It's a dialogue between a woman and her lover who has become an outlaw. She asks him to stay, but in the end he decides to go, living alone outdoors where he has only the dew to drink and wheat in the ear to eat. There is a whole genre of these "outlaw songs".

I heard it at a folk camp near Bacau in 2007, where it was sung by the local old women. They all seemed to know it and sang it at any opportunity, so I heard it several times a day. It wasn't until I got back home that I realized why it carried so much meaning for them. The village economy had mostly collapsed in the post-Communist years - mechanized equipment had gone unrepairable for lack of parts, everything was falling apart. And women did all the work: the men were away working in Hungary or Germany. The woman who put us up hadn't seen her husband for 17 years. The situation in that song was exactly their own.