Subject: RE: So what is 'TRADITIONAL' Folk Music ?
From:
GUEST
Date: 11 Nov 06 - 05:07 AM
Soldier Boy,
Nice one - but...............
By its very nature there are no correct, original or definitive versions of traditional folk music; as Anahata and others pointed out (seems like a thousand years ago), it's not how the songs riginated but what happened to them as they were passed from singer to singer which makes them traditional or folk (I'm still comfortable - and getting more comfortable with both terms). My experience with traditional singers points to the fact that every singer who has sung for us regards his or her own songs (or those songs learned from family members) as correct. All you can ask is that people give you typical examples of what they regard as typical traditional songs AND STATE WHY, otherwise you will end up with a folk 'Desert Island Discs' with everybody giving you their favourite song, which is not what you are asking.
For what they are worth, here are two of mine. I hope you don't mind that I have included notes I have written on both of them for various projects- I'm afraid they are rather lengthy:
1. Barbara Allen
Probably the most widespread of all the ballads, this is known throughout the English-speaking world. Samuel Pepys, in his diary entry for 2nd January 1666 wrote,
"In perfect pleasure I was to hear her" (Mrs Knipp, an actress) "sing, and especially her little Scotch song of Barbary Allen".
Oliver Goldsmith heard it sung by a dairymaid, Peggy Golden, at Lissoy, near Ballymahon, Co. Westmeath, and wrote in 1765,
"The music of the finest singer is dissonance to what I felt when an old dairymaid sung me into tears with "Johnny Armstrong's Last Goodnight" or "The Cruelty Of Barbara Allen".
It first appeared in print in Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany and has continued to make an appearance in folk song collections since. In William Stenhouse's notes to the variant in The Scots Musical Museum, he wrote;
"It has been a favourite ballad at every country fire-side in Scotland, time out of memory………
A learned correspondent informs me that he remembers having heard the ballad frequently sung in Dumfriesshire, where, it was said, the catastrophe took place…"
Bronson gives around two hundred versions, and ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger edited an LP record containing thirty American recordings.
The enduring popularity of the ballad among country singers and a revealing insight into how it was viewed by them, was amply illustrated in an interview with American traditional singer Jean Ritchie who spoke about her work collecting folk songs in Ireland, Scotland and England in the early nineteen fifties.
She says;
"I used the song Barbara Allen as a collecting tool because everybody knew it. When I would ask people to sing me some of their old songs they would sometimes sing "Does Your Mother Come From Ireland", or something about shamrocks. But if I asked if they knew "Barbara Allen", immediately they knew exactly what kind of song I was talking about and they would bring out beautiful old things that matched mine; and were variants of the songs that I knew in Kentucky. It was like coming home".
2 Van Dieman's Land
"Apart from the songs produced directly by the enclosures in England, a side effect of the appropriation of common land provided one of the largest and most poignant bodies of songs in the British and Irish repertoires repertoire, the poaching songs. Deprived of the right to legally catch game on the old commons, the poor resorted to taking it illegally. Many of them continued, as they had always done, to go out at night setting traps to snare rabbits and pheasants. The landowners retaliated by employing keepers to protect what they considered their inalienable right to their newly-acquired property. They also resorted to setting mantraps, large, viciously toothed, spring-loaded devices capable of breaking a man's leg and tearing off chunks of flesh. Also in common use were spring-guns; booby trapped shotguns capable of firing four inch bolts, usually into the poachers legs. The response of the poachers was to go out armed and in larger numbers. This escalation led to a period of English rural history known as "The Poaching Wars". It worked like this. Men who had previously gone out poaching singly resorted to teaming up with others to offer resistance to the gamekeepers employed by the landowner. The landowner would, in his turn, employ more keepers and so ad infnitum. One song from the eastern county of Lincolnshire, entitled "The Rufford Park Poachers" tells of a pitched battle between forty poachers and a similar number of keepers. On being apprehended the poachers would be tried by magistrates who were themselves local landowners who would, as was to be expected, show little mercy. First offenders would usually be heavily fined, but the most common punishment for a repeating offender was transportation to the penal settlements in Australia, usually for long periods. The songs created on this subject cover the whole gamut of attitudes and emotions: despair, anger, defiance, repentance even a boisterous humour. Poaching songs were to be found in abundance throughout Britain and Ireland, but to my mind the best of them is the one popularly found in the Eastern part of England in East Anglia. Entitled simply "Van Dieman's Land", it deals with an event said to have taken place in Warwickshire on Squire Dunhill's (sometimes Donniell's or Daniel's) Estate. In my opinion it is a perfect example of a narrative English traditional song, and what makes it so good is its matter-of-fact presentation of the events. It tells how a young man who goes poaching is taken by the keepers, tried at Warwick Assizes, and sentenced to be transported for fourteen years. He is placed on board ship, endures a six month voyage, lands in Australia, is taken ashore yoked together with other convicts, auctioned to the highest bidder like livestock, and finally settles down to his fate.
Whether the events described can be pinned down to one particular occurrence is debatable, but they are so typical of what was happening all over rural England that the song passed into numerous versions with different names and locations. This version was sung to us by the late Walter Pardon, a carpenter who came from a farming background in a small village in North Norfolk. He described it as "a long old song, but then", as he said, "it was a long old journey", which, for me, is an example of a singers relating perfectly to his song".
Jim Carroll
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sj
