Subject: RE: So what is 'TRADITIONAL' Folk Music ?
From:
GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 25 Oct 06 - 12:29 PM
Mike Miller, you gave me a good chuckle at the image of Captain Birdseye milkin' them goats to a Dylan song -- the epitome of the rhythmic worksong. Tamp them ties, load that bale, squirt that milk... It's a SHAME the way she MAKES me scrub the FLOOR......yank...squirt...
And I AINT (squirt)
Gonna WORK (squirt)
On Maggie's FARM (squirt)
No MORE! (squirt)
(But seriously folks),
Variability seems to be right at the core of traditional song, if only because the songs pass hither and thither via hearsay, and thus act like a rumor or a meme, growing (or dwindling) and changing as they move. So the mention of Elias Lonnrot and the Kalevala raises one objection many people pose to tradition continuing onward via printed or electronic means: doesn't it die if it takes on fixed form? So if you "learn it off the record" or out of the book, aren't you freezing something that is amoebic by nature?
The Kalevala is an interesting case. In the earliest recording era there were still a few Finns who sang the root songs Lonnrot made his epic from; and they can be heard on ancient 78s. Those Finns were folksingers. But by amalgamating and freezing the Kalevala in book form (as "Homer" or whoever did with the Iliad), did Lonnrot stop tradition in its tracks? It appears he may have. I'm not aware of a live tradition of Finnish epic songs today with any roots apart from the Kalevala itself.
That comes close to the bone, because, as Ron Olesko mentioned, Sharp tinkered with the songs he collected before publishing. So, notoriously, did John and especially Alan Lomax, to the extent that a huge amount of our core American traditional songbase is forever suspect! No kiddin'! We look at songs like "On Top of Old Smoky" or "Old Joe Clark" and have to realize the Lomaxes assembled and in some cases rewrote the "standard" verses to suit their idea of a coherent song. Not to mention the bowdlerization for which Baring-Gould is notorious, but which in fact was done by nearly every collector. A look at the un-bowdlerized songs in Legman's edition of Randolph's Ozark off-color material is a resounding razzberry to all those simon-pure collections that preceded it -- albeit Randolph, in his era, had no choice.
My instinct screams: they had no right to mess with it! I want the stuff, not from some educator or folklorist, but from the horse's mouth! (That's the Big Bill Broonzy horse that sings, I guess.) I have spent my life trying to get around and beyond the interpreters' versions, the folklorists' evasions, to the "real thing" from sources in the field.
But of course that's a will o' the wisp since, again it bears saying, the "pure" tradition was never pure. It survived only by being adulterated countless times over. If it hadn't been "adulterated" and "tainted," it could never have become folksong (traditional song = becoming -- a process, as someone else said).
So without all that "ruination of the older, purer version," we'd still be singing "A Quainte Adventure of Ye Frogge and Ye Mouse" instead of "Frog He Would a-Wooing Go" or "Froggie Went a-Courtin'."
Next, quite a bit has been well said here, especially by Jim Carroll, on the subject of community. That raises an old dichotomy among lovers of traditional song. Surely, like traditional dance, which almost by definition must be a group activity, traditional song may be a community resource -- singing circles, evening family self-entertainment.
But unlike dance, traditional singing is and was, perhaps even more prevalently, a solo activity. Folk songs were sung by solitary people singing to themselves, whether at work or play or just to pass the time, divorced from performance even in the most informal sense. You and I and everyone have all done that, I think, enough to know what it feels like. Even if the songs arose in a traditional community, as often as not they turn into a personal expression in solitude. Sung to the four walls, to a hiking trail, to a mule, to the birds, or to your dog or cat. Could that mean that rootedness, in a traditional or even a pickup community (as with campfire singing), is only part of the story, and not an exclusive criterion?
Finally, Jim, you're devastatingly right in what you say about today's "passive recipients" of culture-from-above. Nothing could be truer. There is no tradition if people merely hum by rote something they heard on the radio or off the jukebox or on MTV. Is there a possibility of "couch potato" folkmusic? Could Homer Simpson by any stretch ever sing a folksong?
Continuance of any tradition requires individual initiative. -- Like our younger selves back then, hearing traditional songs or even reading them out of a book, unable to breathe or think until we had learned them, sung them, made them "our own" (whatever that may mean). Mad to sing them to friends, taking a guitar to parties, denting people's ears, making nuisances of ourselves. Ferreting out ever more obscure songs, springing them on whoever will sit still long enough. It takes drive, and it has to happen apart from received culture.
But we did it, didn't we? And our younger contemporaries are doing it now, however divorced they may be from what we now conceive as "traditional life." (But, remember, our inheritors in the 22nd century may view "tradition" and "traditional life" as something that's still in the future for us.)
To get a little too abstract for a moment: When definitions change, it doesn't negate all that has gone before. That earlier state of things may pass out of memory, i.e., die. But more frequently and most indigestible of all, it changes its semantics and its worldview so that the past turns into an unrecognizable future.
I think from the viewpoint of our predecessors of, say, 1800, that's how the "traditional folk" must have looked as they were changing and developing and "ruining" old songs toward 1900. Think how Britain and Europe's native traditional population might have disowned the breakaway singing and songs of emigrants to the US, Australia, Canada etc. To them, those innovations would have seemed futuristic and not traditional at all! That's not unlike how we have arrived at where we are now, in and after 2000, full of qualms of conscience because we're not traditional.
What I've said about tradition as a moving force onward into the future is predicated on that continuing drive and initiative to learn and pass along songs, if on no other criterion. Everything else may change, but people must be song carriers or tradition fails. The existence (and fervor) of DT, plus all the contemporary folkie communities it dovetails with, from performers to home singers to amateur hum-and-whistlers, makes me think it is continuing, even if by strange new means.
But nobody's required to take the long view. It's more fun just to sing the songs and feel the power of connection to everything we know and feel about them. If we can find a way to be at home with our shifty-eyed definitions of what's traditional, so much the better.
Bob
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