Ni pa tener buena voz.
Yo canto para que vayan
Las penas del corazon. No sé que tiene mis penas
Que no me qüieren dejar.
Ayer me separo de ellas
Y hoy me vuelven a encontrar. (I don't sing for singing's sake, nor because I've a good voice. I sing so that my troubles may leave my heart. I don't know what's wrong with my troubles that they don't want to leave me. Yesterday I separate myself from them, and today they come back to meet me.) In British tradition, there is an abundance of songs whose purpose is to give expression to heartbreak, and so console the singer. Those with only a slight acquaintance with folksongs are familiar with such verses as: I wish my baby it was born
And smiling on its father's knee,
And I was dead and in my grave,
And the green grass growing over me, or: I sit upon the high green land where quiet the waters lie.
I think I see my true love sail atween the sea and sky,
With one babe at my bosom and another at my knee,
I sorrow for my sodger lad in Low Germany. Less familiar, but often even more striking as illustrations of folkmusic function, are those songs dealing explicitly with the class struggle, the "songs of protest" as they are called. Protest songs form a category which is very common in the repertoire of folksingers in many parts of the world, though here again, the printed collections are often poor guides. For this, there may be a twofold reason: on the one hand, the collector may suppress such songs as disrespectful, on the other hand and this is even more likely the singer may withhold such songs for fear of giving offence to his genteel guest. Such songs may be defiant: You take mah labour, an' steal mah time,
Give me ol' dish pan an' a lousy dime,
'Case I'm a nigger, dat's why. White man, white man, sit in de shade,
Here in de hot sun, sweat wid de spade,
'Case I'm a nigger, dat's why. Worm get turnin', cat hug a lion,
Mah hell get risin', don' care about dyin',
Case I'm a nigger, dat's why. They may be heartfelt exhortations, as the song written by the coalminer's wife who watched the strikers' children walking barefoot in the rain to the soup kitchen, and said: "After they had passed by I just set down by the table and began to wonder what to try to do next. Then I began to sing out my blues to express my feeling. This song come straight from the heart and not just from the point of a pen." Her song ends: Oh, don't go under that mountain
With the slate a-hangin' over your head,
And work for just coalite and carbide,
And your children a-cryin' for bread. Oh listen, friends and workers,
Please take a friend's advice,
Don't load no more, don't pull no more,
Till you get a living price. Or they may be satirical, as the biting dialogue song The Coalowner and the Pitman's Wife, which was orally circulating among Durham colliers for more than a century before it finally appeared in print in 1952. Whatever the character of these protest songs, research in areas where relations between collector and singer are uninhibited suggests that such songs abound to an undreamed of extent. The question of relation between the folklorist and the bearer of folksong is a particularly important one, connected as it is with such vital problems as the investigation of the creation of folksong. Putting aside the romantic theory that all folksongs have their genesis in some mysterious collective activity, putting aside also the so called realistic theory that all folksongs are inherited from upper class cultured sources, there still remains the problem: Who starts off a new folksong and how? Many folklorists believe in the total absence of any author for a folksong, and make anonymity an essential condition, as if a folksong would cease to be a folksong if, one day, the name of its humble author were to come to light. Now, in the main, our folklorists have had little luck in their interrogation of folksingers regarding the authorship of songs of apparently recent makeup in their repertoire. Perhaps there has been too little trust between investigator and informant. Perhaps too, the folklorist has been taking too narrow a view of what constitutes a folksong. A most remarkable example of self imposed limitation is afforded by those folklorists the majority of Western folklorists, in fact who regard rural manifestations as the only ones worthy of their attention, who would deny the term "folksong" to any product of the cities, whether orally transmitted or not, and who prefer to disregard any historical evidence of song traffic between the urban and rural lower classes. Now, in fact, the working classes in the towns and cities probably played an enormous part in shaping the folksong not only of countries such as Britain, but also of those East European countries where some folklorists would have us believe the peasantry have been living in a closed rural civilisation, utterly cut off from town culture, high or low. I believe that would be a most rewarding field of study, the influence of town workers on our folksong heritage. Particularly since, if our folksong has any future, that future lies with the town workers. It cannot be overlooked that at least part of the newly revived interest in folk music has a strong political bias. There are many who believe that music may be a force to assist the progress of the human race; and since folk music is created directly out of the common experience and aspirations of working people, it follows that folksong is likely to be a powerful aid not only in mirroring man's condition, but also in encouraging him on his forward march. Also, folksong is the most truly and deeply national aspect of our musical culture, and at a time when that culture is in grave danger of losing its independence, it is well that we avail ourselves of what we can in the way of fortification. A prominent folklorist recently remarked: "I am told that certain trade unions have become interested in promoting folk music lately. Is it an accident that these are precisely the most militant unions ?" He could be assured that this was no accident. Capitalism has made a sad mess of our folksong tradition, but the outlook for a revival not merely of interest in folk music, but of the actual creation of new forms of it does not seem so dark as it did in, for instance, Cecil Sharp's time. Our native musical idioms are among the most powerful as well as most beautiful in Europe, and there seems to be a wide audience, young, hungry for culture, anxious to listen to folksong, and what is more important, to take it into their own repertoire, to make it part of their own cultural baggage. Can those circumstances lead to a revival of folk music creation? It remains to be seen. But it is worth bearing in mind that if the old folksong repertoire largely passed out of wide popular use during the nineteenth century, the process of oral transmission remained, though altered by new social conditions. After all, relatively few people learn their music from print; and radio and gramophone must be regarded as extensions, and very powerful extensions, of the means of oral diffusion. The young man in the suburban back room who tries over on his trumpet a tune learned from the radio, and who scorns to play it as he heard it, but determines to improvise, to vary, to impose his own fancy on the melody, may not be playing folk music, but he is perpetuating a technique which the folk musician whether Galician bagpiper or Uzbek drummer would recognise and sympathise with. His heart is in the right place, the problem is for him to supply himself with musical material that is worth exercising his fantasy on. At the 1952 Conference of the International Folk Music Council, the eminent American musicologist Charles Seeger had interesting things to say about the revival of traditional music in an industrialised society: "If.. . the common ultimate goal is maximum continuity between the best known of the past and the best conceivable for the future, what we have to deal with here is an equation between what people will accept from their ancestors, and what they will create for themselves and their children. No matter what the reviver thinks of the present state of affairs, therefore, he must accept it as his given quantity and use it as the base that it inevitably is for whatever accretion it may accept. This base will in all probability be a conglomeration of opera arias, salon music, popular songs of various vintages, some folk and near folk materials . . . and not to be forgotten the commercial exploitation of the whole lot. Indigestible? By no means. Oral tradition can digest anything, give it but enough time." Those who feel that the springs of folk creation have dried up, as far as the industrial worker is concerned, may take heart from what happened in America in the 1930s. There, the great stimulus towards the creation of new folksong began when militant trade unionism swept through the textile mills and coalfields of the south, among industrial workers still living within a traditional folk culture. Folk bards arose such as the North Carolina cotton spinner Ella May Wiggins, Aunt Molly Jackson the Kentucky miner's wife, and most remarkable of all, the Oklahoma migratory worker Woody Guthrie, whom one folklorist has described as "the best folk ballad composer whose identity has ever been known." Guthrie poses a special problem for the academic folklorist. Musically, he was brought up within the folk tradition. His manner of performance and style of creation are traditional. Is one to take it that he was a folksinger while he was among the migratory workers, and ceased to be so when he moved into the city? Is he a folk balladeer while he makes up songs in his head, and does he cease to be one when he reaches for his typewriter? Such people, and a host of others, known and anonymous, enriched the fund of American folksong with hundreds, perhaps thousands of pieces, some deep in the oldest traditional style, others having much of the ring of the jukebox or the talking film, but devoted to describing the condition and aspirations of the modern folk community, the industrial community, and capable of becoming synthesised into an eloquent traditional shape, just as in the past our tradition has absorbed and been enriched by all kinds of disparate musical influences. The new folksong movement that came into being under the impulse of trade union enthusiasm during the early days of the C.I.O. did not confine itself to the singing South. Its leadership quickly passed into the hands of city dwellers. The movement led to a vast resurgence of oral singing whose wave has, at least momentarily, receded under McCarthyism, but whose effect is being felt most vigorously in Britain. The example is a salutary one, for it showed that, in order to move the urban masses, one does not have to rely, as the Wobblies did, on the parody of the Salvation Army hymn and the parlour ballad. The Brooklyn garment worker and the man punching out car fenders in Dearborn showed himself capable of taking old traditional songs to his heart, even pentatonic ones, and of producing his own songs in the form of a modern adaptation of the traditional pattern. Of course, much that was so produced was raw and fugitive. But a number of these songs had stamina enough to stick in the imagination of singers, to pass into currency, to start the life of change and adaptation that is proper to the true folksong. Now, we hardly know what we have in the way of British industrial folksong. The field remains almost unexplored, though a superficial investigation of songs of the coal mining industry has produced sufficient results to indicate that the coalfields, at least, are richer in folksong than was commonly supposed. But what concerns us here is not only the folksong of the past, but the folksong of our time, valid for the everyday lives of town workers, such as began to emerge in the United States shortly before the war. In Britain, the ground for a similar resurgence is prepared. It may be that the impulse to germinate is not far off. Notes
From The Marxist Quarterly (January 1954) Lawrence and Wishart "Folk-Song for Our Time?" pp. 47-56.