Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From:
Jack Blandiver
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 05:38 AM
WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE?
Stop your dementoring a moment there, Jim, and have a look at what I actually said back there. The evidence is the songs themselves; they remain Exhibit A - be they in the broadsheets, or else collected from the lips of the singers themselves. Songs don't write themselves - and they don't arise out of random human failings such as memory loss. I trust the one thing we can agree on here is that Traditional Folk Song represents the finest literature there is, vernacular or otherwise, in the English language. In many cases we do know who wrote them - we certainly know who wrote the sogs of Tommy Armstrong, and we know who wrote McGinties Meal an' Ale and countless others; songs which, if we didn't know of the authors, we would think of as being traditional. Tommy was well versed in the tradition; he wrote his songs to traditional tunes, and he is most fortunate that his genius is remembered along with his name - most others, it would seem, were not.
There are times me might well encounter a song as we would, say, some 19th-century oak wainscotting from the bunk of an old fishing smack and simply marvel at the craft and genius of the thing. This year, Fylde-goers can do this by attending Songs Next to The Harriet (in honour of the late, great, Matt Armour) to be held in the exhibition space where now resides The Harriet herself along with other choice exhibits all lovingly curated by the indefatigable Dick Gillingham. Though the craftsmen of such pieces never left their mark, we know we're in the presence of an individual master of his trade, capable of creating bespoke artefacts of utter uniqueness that are corporeal manifestations of a centuries old tradition.
Here in this DIY flat-packing age-of-convenience where I might take pride in a shoddy machine-cut Ikea bookshelf erected in a matter seconds, I might only pause to ponder when in the presence of a real piece of 18th / 19th century carpentry no matter how utilitarian. How I love to plunder antique shops, to pull out old dresser-drawers and marvel at the hand cut joints - the work of anonymous, long dead craftsmen who were part of an unbroken tradition of woodworking going back thousands of years (certainly if Kipling is to be believed in A Truthful Song). But no, we don't know their names, nor yet their biographies (much less those of the Victorian brickies who built the house I'm sitting in now, snug and warm even on this premature November morning at the back end of August, against the worst the Irish sea might hurl at it!) but we know they were there, because their works remain as evident masterpieces.
Likewise, I feel, with Traditional Folk Songs & Ballads (vernacular masterpieces all) the masters were very often the traditional singers themselves, as well-versed in their craft as any wheelwright, or else a veritable Jack-of-all-trades: a real human individual none-the-less, who not only made the songs, but made the songs their own by very purposeful & deliberate (but never gratuitous) adaptation to their own needs. Thus the songs existed in their Natural Environment, their true ecology, their original and Traditional Pre-Revival Context, which was as a fluid as an oral corporeal tradition can be - very often illiterate, as were many tradesmen, tinkers and the like, yet we might marvel at their genius now right enough.
In Traditional Music we might marvel at the compositions of Simon Frazer, Nathanial Gow, James Macpherson, Turlough O'Carolan, Blind Rory Dall O'Cahan and countless other creative masters of the craft both old and new, in full knowledge that someone, somewhere, somewhen, wrote these tunes we call traditional, and that someone else, somewhere else, somewhen else, adapted them. We can be sure that these people knew what they were doing - as told of in The Legend of Knockgrafton, where, bored with the song of the little-people, the hunchback Lusmore adds his own variant to make it more interesting, so pleasing the little-people with his musical skill they remove his hump. But woe betide Jack Madden! Who thinking to lose his own hump, ends up with two humps for his own efforts.
What else is a tradition but the mastery that can not only make things, but keeps on making them, improving them, passing such skills on to others who'll make their own improvements, or not as they see fit? What others call The Folk Process, I see as something a good deal more purposeful, and determined. Variations occur by way living morphology and deliberate transformation - which are most assuredly not the random by-product of some fanciful collectivity dreamed of by the gentry as the quaint consequence of an ill-educated peasantry who couldn't possibly know what they were doing, far less its true meaning and value. They knew right enough, and we have the songs to prove it.
Just ideas though - open, as I say, to discussion, though no doubt the The Folk Dementors will be out in force to tell me just what a jumped up and disrespectful clown I am for daring to say such things. I am, after all, only 48-years-old and have only been singing Traditional Songs for 35 years. What can I possibly know?
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sj
