Folk Got Soul

Folk Got Soul

Dear <>

I’ve just landed back in town for a few days in between festies, emerging from what felt step back into an ancient world of music at at Sidmouth Folk Week.

Watching clusters of singers, fiddle and melodeon players, bards, storytellers and morris dancers gathering in every corner they could find was just so enlivening.  Music flowed like a pulsing, resonant river through every vein and chamber of the seaside town. 
 

It prompted me to ask again what’s at the core of traditional songs - why do they sing on? what do they have to teach us?

1. Oral history

In times gone by before TVs and radios, singing and storytelling was the way people would have processed the events of their day.  I am aware that this is the case for many cultures, and use English songs here only because I am more familiar with them.  Many traditional songs are based on real life goings on - Molly Bawn is based on ‘The shooting of his dear’ a true story of an accidental shooting, The Water is Wide grew out of the tale of a unhappy aristocratic marriage. Folk Songs were olden days newsreels and celebrity gossip.  Their themes are still relevant today - people are still shooting, leaving and loving one another everyday.

2.  Love

‘Come all you young men, who go a courting, pray you give attention to what I say’ - so says the words of The Sweet Primroses.  The endless tales of Love’s merry and maddening dance fill the folk ballads of yesteryear.  Songs like The Foggy Dew would have been sex education for many a youngster.  Like almost every song in the current mainstream pop charts, there are songs that teach, warn, moralize, eroticize, celebrate, commiserate and commemorate every possible convolution of romance.

3. Protest

Whether its the song of a woman wronged by her lover, a man taken off to sea against his will or the more obviously politicized songs which accompany uprisings throughout history, singing empowers people to raise their voices and right their wrongs.

4. Work Songs

The rhythm of labour is built into many folk songs - the choruses of sea shanties like Way Haul Away contain the motion of rowing.   Like the spirituals that emerged from slavery, songs arose from people immersed in the routines of work, helping them survive.  Many folk songs were collected from working class communities by upper class song collectors, who received accolades, memorials, libraries etc but the rhythm of the songs remind us of the very real conditions they emerged from and resonate with the memory of many an unnamed heroine/hero.

5. Death

Folk songs can seem incredibly morbid at times, written as they were in times when life expectancy was shorter and death walked hand in hand with life.  They can be a refreshing antidote to the sanitized denial of death that often occurs in modern day life.  

6. Violence

Whether it’s jealous sisters, ugly uncles, spiteful stepmothers, fearsome fathers, betrayed lovers or dastardly womanisers, the characters of folk songs come armed with guns, axes, swords, bottles, knives, ropes, poison or simply their own fair hands.  In harder times, a quick push into the river or over a cliff would settle the issue of feeding another hungry child or supporting a pregnant woman.  Scores are settled with a very rough justice - a man who has eloped with a woman on false pretences finds the tables turned when he tries to push her in the sea (Lady Isabel).  The very bottom of the barrel of human behaviour is excavated unflinchingly in songful catharsis.

7. Supernatural

In folk songs, ghosts return from the grave, the heads of the beheaded speak and strange signs, omens, riddles punctuate the tellings of tall tales.   Whatever our beliefs about the afterlife, the ancestors definitely make their presence felt in the often eerie breeze of these melodies.  My father has excavated our ancestral connection to Thomas Hardy’s grandfather (also called Thomas Hardy) who ran the Stinsford String Choir which played weekly in the West Gallery of his village church, at a time when I am feeling the urge to pick up my violin bow again, so I certainly felt mine whispering to me this week.

If you'd like to venture further down the twisting lanes of folk songs, do join me for two special Summer workshops Folk Got Soul Singing Workshops.

Katie Rose’s Virtual Busk for WaterAid
As I am once again joining Sing for Water - a momentuous gathering of 800 singers at the Thames Festival raising funds for WaterAid - where I busk ‘Maid on the Shore’ from my album Empty Cup -  please do have a listen and throw some pennies in my virtual bucket.

Wishing you wonderful songful summer times