The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #57951   Message #916102
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
22-Mar-03 - 03:06 PM
Thread Name: Outlaw songs - not in English
Subject: RE: Outlaw songs - not in English
Boris Vian's fairly modern song is in the DT: LE D+SERTEUR, and has been posted a couple of times subsequently as well. French tradition has plenty of songs about lawbreakers on the run, but I can't think of any about outlaws as such just at the moment.

Central and Eastern Europe, however, has plenty, often of epic length; there was more scope there, geographically, for outlaw bands. A. L. Lloyd recorded quite a few in Bulgaria and Albania; the older ones tended to be about the Haiduks, who, like Robin Hood, lived in the forests; chiefly resisting the Ottoman Empire, while the later ones dealt with the wartime partisans who resisted the Nazi and Fascist invaders. He also found one, Zenel Kadrija, written in the traditional form, about a fight with postwar American saboteurs parachuted into Albania by the OSS in an abortive attempt to blow up the Pukë hydroelectric dam.