Anglo American Folk Music

Background and History

On his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, there is a song called "Girl from the North Country." The song has very simple lyrics, in which the singer asks a traveler to say hello to a girl he once knew, who lives near a fair that the traveler may be visiting.

That song is remarkably similar to "Scarborough Fair," recorded three years later and included on Simon and Garfunkel's album Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme. In the song, the traveler is asked to say hello to a girl, but the singer goes on to make a number of mysterious requests. The singer wants the girl to make him a cambric shirt, and to find him an acre of land beside the sea which she must tend with "a sickle of leather." Paul Simon learned the song from Martin Carthy, an English folk musician, and Carthy found them in a group of northern English folk songs collected by Frank Kidson in the late nineteenth century.

Both songs are remarkably similar to a ballad known as "The Elfin Knight." The earliest published version of it appeared in 1673, in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is undoubtedly much older, and belongs to the medieval tradition of games and rhymes in which the devil sets nine riddles, or tasks. Twelve versions of the song were collected by Francis J. Child, and included in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published between 1892 and 1894. In most of these, an elf sets a maiden a number of impossible tasks, including sewing a shirt without seams and planting corn on the barren sand beside the sea. One Scottish example, which Child found in an 1810 book of nursery rhymes, has the refrain "Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme." Another Scottish example asks the traveler, "Did ye ever travel twixt Berwick and Lyne?" Most were collected in northern England and Scotland, but one was collected in New York, by way of Massachusetts. The traveler in this version is traveling to Cape Ann, on the Massachusetts coast. We can say that this version is an authentic American folk song.

Folk music, as Woody Guthrie said, is ".music of the people, by the people, and for the people." It is the musical expression of a community at work and at play, in celebration and in mourning, in love and out of love, at war and at peace. The community can be a household, a farm, a village, or it can be a whole nation. Folk songs are not composed music: they have evolved, often over many generations, out of the lives of men and women. They continue to evolve as they are passed on from generation to generation, and from musician to musician. This process is known as oral transmission.

History thru Folk Music

American social history is enshrined in our folk music. The folk music of the United States is as vast and varied as the country itself. We can often trace the origins of particular songs and melodies back to England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Russia, and all the other countries from which the American people came before they became Americans.

We can also find sources for parts of American folk music heritage in West Africa and the Caribbean. Songs of hope and liberation were, and remain, the soundtrack of the long march to emancipation. Just as enslaved Africans integrated the hymns, lullabies, and dance music of European settlers into their spirituals and blues, so Anglo Americans incorporated work songs, field hollers, blues, and black gospel music into their living folk heritage. The title of a fiddle tune, or square dance, known as "The Cherokee Shuffle" refers to the March of Tears of 1838-1839, but has its roots in Ireland rather than in the Native American nation.

Influence of War, Peace, and Social Change

War and social upheaval often act as a catalyst to the lyrical invention and adaptation upon which the folk traditions thrive. The Revolutionary War set new words to tunes inherited from the very people against whom Americans were fighting: "Yankee Doodle," or something very much like it, was sung by children in southern Europe before 1500, and the British sang a version of it to taunt the colonial rebels before those rebels defiantly made the song their own. The American Civil War, too, put new words to old songs: "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was a resetting of an old Irish folk song called "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye." "The Dying Hobo," a traditional song of obscure folk origins, became "Beside a Belgian Water Tank" to American soldiers in the First World War, and "Beside a Laotian Waterfall" to American forces in the Vietnam War. As John Lomax (1867-1948), the folk musicologist said, "The old songs adapt and abide."

Peace was also a great backdrop against which to create music. Many people came to this country over the centuries to escape conflict, poverty, famine, and persecution. In building new lives for themselves, they created America. Domestic life is one of the great staples of folk music-love, work, religious faith, family, and the rearing of children.

Children's Game Songs, Skipping Songs, and Counting Songs

Children have their own folk music. Songs are an essential part of their games and activities, and some of their songs are ancient. Skipping and counting songs that children still sing can often be traced back to medieval British, Gaelic, and European game chants. The American skipping song that starts "Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief." has its roots in the English, "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor." The counting chant "One-potato, two-potato" goes back to an old English sheep-counting song that starts "yan, tan, tethera, pethera"-as the original language was lost, so "pethera" became "potato."

Religious Influences

American folk songs often have a strong religious component. We hear echoes of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Christian hymns in traditional American folk music, and religion is a very real presence in modern country music. "Simple Gifts," a Shaker song of the Appalachians, is a celebration of the plain religious life of that community. In 1944, Aaron Copland (1900-1990) composed the music for the ballet Appalachian Spring out of the rich musical heritage of this region.

Music for Dancing

The square dances of Texas, as well as the reels of Kentucky and the northeastern seaboard, have their origins in the hoolies, fleadhs, and ceilidhs of Scotland and Ireland. The fiddles, accordions, pipes, guitars, and banjoes are associated with American folk music are, like the settlers, early immigrants to a new world. But the music that evolved, and continues to evolve, is American. It is part of our national identity.

The 1900s and Beyond

Until the twentieth century, folk music was an overlooked treasure. It belonged to the country and the mountains rather than to the city. But radio gave folk music an enormous audience. In the 1930s, interest in the music grew. Men like Jimmie Rogers and Bill Monroe became stars. The "Grand Ole Opry," first broadcast as a local barn dance in 1925, reached a vast national audience during the 1930s. Ethnomusicologists like Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), John Lomax (1876-1948), and Alan Lomax (1915-2002) began to pay serious attention to the traditional music of rural America.

In 1952 the Smithsonian Institution released a six-record set of folk music and songs recorded between 1927 and 1935. The Anthology of American Folk Music was to have a profound influence on the way Americans identified themselves, historically and culturally. It fostered the folk music boom of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as providing material and inspiration to such artists as Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, The Everly Brothers, and The Kingston Trio. It fuelled the protest movement, and artists like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger drew on its deep resources.

These days, folk music is big business. Country singers are international stars rather than local celebrities. This is not a denial of its authenticity, but an indication of its continuing power to move, to inspire, and to give meaning to the real lives of real people.