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What is a “folk song”? This is a question that has been raised over many years with no agreed-upon answer. Here we explore the origins of this term, and the collection of these songs.<\/p>\n
The term \u201cthe folk<\/em>\u201d was first coined in the late eighteenth century by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). In Herder\u2019s view each folk<\/em> comes from a common language and geography, centered around a common culture, which he called \u201cfolklore<\/em>.\u201d The concept of \u201cfolk songs<\/em>\u201d as different from other types of songs suggested that these songs would soon be lost. Herder believed that the songs of the peasants were rooted in a folk culture that was untouched by modern times and foreign ways, and in danger of being lost in a rapidly changing world.<\/p>\n In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries European intellectuals turned their attention to the vernacular culture of their peasants, farmers, and craftspeople in a sort of \u201cdiscovery of the people.\u201d There was the Kultur der Gelehrten<\/em>\u00a0 (the learned culture) and the Kultur des Volkes <\/em>\u00a0(the people\u2019s culture). The latter was favored by Herder: \u201cunless our literature is founded on our Volk, we <\/em>[writers] shall write eternally for the closet sages and disgusting critics out of whose mouths and stomachs we shall get back what we have given<\/em>.\u201d He felt that folk culture offered a way out of Enlightenment\u2019s stifling emphasis on reason; folk culture was a way to cleanse culture of an artificiality that he thought was poisoning modern life.<\/p>\n Herder called upon his fellow Germans to go out among the peasants and collect their lore and songs before it was too late and they disappeared. He published several volumes of poetry entitled Volkslieder<\/em> (folk songs) in the 1770s. He argued that only authentic German folklore could provide the basis for German art and culture.<\/p>\n In England old ballads were collected and published, the first of which was entitled A Collection of Old Ballads<\/em> published in 1723.\u00a0 This was in response to a fad among the middle and aristocratic classes for things \u201ccountry.\u201d The subtitle by the anonymous editor stressed its antiquarian nature: \u201cCorrected from the best and most Ancient Copies Extant<\/em>.\u201d These collections had great popular appeal and several more volumes were published.\u00a0 This led to the first landmark ballad collection, Reliques of English Poetry<\/em>, published in 1765 by an English clergyman Thomas Percy. Despite their low and middle class origins, he presented them as works of high culture, attributed to early medieval minstrels who had been respected artists in medieval courts.<\/p>\n To an emerging generation of romantic poets and philosophers these ballads were popular poetry, indicative of the considerable creative power of the untutored folk. Not anyone counted as folk<\/em>. For Herder, the pursuit of Volk<\/em> involved a distinction between \u201ctrue volk\u201d<\/em> (primarily rural peasants) and \u201cthe urban rabble in the streets,\u201d<\/em> \u00a0<\/em>who \u201cnever sing or rhyme but scream and mutilate<\/em>.\u201d \u00a0In order to preserve the “original true essence of this poetry<\/em>,” early collectors felt compelled to make \u201ccorrections and additions<\/em>\u201d of their collected ballads.\u00a0 This practice provoked many later collectors, but it continued into the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n In 1808 John Finlay wrote in his introduction to Scottish Historical and Romantic Ballads<\/em>: \u201cA very few years will carry into oblivion all that yet remains among the peasantry of our old hereditary song; for it is almost exclusively from the recitation of very old people, that the lately recovered pieces have been obtained<\/em>.\u201d Nearly a century later the most important and influential collector of English folk songs, Cecil Sharp, wrote: \u201cIt becomes\u2026a matter of the highest importance that not only the songs, but that all things that relate to the art of folk-singing, should be accurately recorded while there is yet time and opportunity, They, one and all, form part and parcel of a great tradition that stretches back into the mists of the past in one long, unbroken chain, of which the last link is now, alas, being forged<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n British folk song collectors in the early nineteenth century responded to Herder\u2019s concern that folk songs were a precious commodity in danger of being lost in an industrialized and increasingly mobilized world. With a sense of urgency they began to collect and preserve this legacy. Traditional music was passed from person to person by spoken word and was rarely written down. Therein lay its strength and weakness \u2013 people and their memories. The traditional song collector and singer Frank Hart said of the distinction between history and folk music that \u201cthose in power write the history, while those who suffer write the songs<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Francis James Child (1825-1896) was an American scholar, educator, folklorist, and Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University. In 1876 he began work on a collection of English and Scottish ballads now known as the Child Ballads. Child was more a literary folklorist, interested in folk song as popular poetry, and analyzing ballads as texts largely divorced from their tunes. Ballads that became popular for the masses as printed broadsides, were of little interest to him; he concentrated on songs that predated the printing press, which came to Britain in 1475. These efforts resulted in an eight-volume collection (between 1882 and 1898) entitled The English and Scottish Popular Ballads<\/em>\u00a0 and containing 305 different titles (each given a unique number).\u00a0 For each song Child printed every known variant (thirteen hundred in all) with numerous annotations on the songs\u2019 historical origins, the subject matter, and alterations they had suffered.<\/p>\n In the early twentieth century interest in folk music and collecting in England centered around Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) and his assistant Maud Karpeles. This was sometimes called \u201cthe first folk revival,\u201d and led to organizations such as the Folk-Song Society, which merged into the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) in 1932,<\/p>\n Cecil Sharp composed and taught music. Music education in England was highly based on tunes from German folk music. Sharp became interested in the vocal and instrumental (dance) music of the British Isles. He started collecting songs in Somerset in 1903, and over a period of years collected over sixteen hundred texts and tunes from 350 singers. He advocated the rescue of English folk songs and teaching of these songs in schools. He was also interested in dance and brought about the revival of Morris dancing.<\/p>\n By 1917 Sharp felt that his song collecting in England was complete, and was delighted to find that English folk songs survived in isolated rural regions of the American Appalachia. He, along with his assistant Karpeles, made a visit to America during 1916-1918 where he lectured on English folk songs and made field recordings of English folk songs that had survived in remote mountain hamlets of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Many of these were different versions of those he had collected in rural England. This culminated in the publication of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians collected by Cecil J. Sharp<\/em>, comprising two hundred and seventy-four songs and ballads with nine hundred and sixty-eight tunes, edited by Maud Karpeles in 1932. This led to an interest among other collectors to find and preserve a treasure of songs from these isolated regions before they disappeared in face of the spread of radio and phonograph recordings.<\/p>\n John (1867-1948) \u00a0and Alan (1915-2002) Lomax were among other collectors who sought out remote hamlets across American where traditional folk songs still survived. In their introduction to American Ballads and Folk Songs<\/em> \u00a0they said: \u201cA life of isolation, without books or newspapers or telephone or radio, breeds songs and ballads<\/em>.\u201d Alan Lomax wrote: \u201cSlowly our folk songs grew, part dream and part reality, part past and part present. Each phrase rose from the depths of the heart or was carved out of the rock of experience. Each line was sung smooth by many singers, who tested it against the American reality, until the language became apt and truthful and tough as cured hickory. Here lies the secret to their beauty. They evoke the feeling of a place and of belonging to a particular branch of the human family. They honestly describe or protest against the deepest ills that afflict us \u2013 the color bar, our repressed sexuality, our love of violence and our loneliness. Finally, they have been cared for and shaped by so many hands that they have acquired a patina of art, and reflect the tenderest and most creative impulses of the human heart, casting upon our often harsh and melancholy tradition a luster of true beauty<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n