Part 5: Folk Songs
Folk Songs: An Introduction
Throughout any culture, folk songs play an important role: they are the music of the "folk," the farmers living in the countryside and working class living in cities, those who never learned to read, but who passed down their songs from generation to generation through oral transmission, changing as each singer provided their own variations! Folk songs are the entertainment of earlier centuries, and so they often tell stories: stories of new seasons, of new or lost love, or a tragic death. Their longevity speaks to the popularity of them, both their socially relevant words and engaging tunes. They represent what is important to a culture over time.
Most English folk songs can be traced to well back to Elizabethan times and before. Victorians' contribution to folk songs is their new appreciation for songs "of the past" and of the "countryside", especially because much of their population was moving to the cities. Many people, therefore, began to collect folk-song lyrics from folk singers. This began as early as the 1830s with such collections as William Chappell's A Collection of National English Airs (1838). By the end of the century a full-scale, Folk Song Revival had developed, especially for nationalistic reasons as they recognized folk songs to be their English musical heritage. Professional musicians like Cecil Sharp and Percy Granger now went out to the countryside and not only jotted down the words from singers but the music, too, discovering many variations to one song as it has been passed down differently in different communities. Ralph Vaughan Williams is perhaps the most famous of the Revivalists: he incorporated English folk tunes into major orchestral compositions like the English Folk Song Suite (1923) and the Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934) and Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus (1939).
Folksongs are not written specifically for children, but children have always sung them, either because they were all a community was singing or because they have been deemed important (or simpler) enough for children to learn them. Even today, it is inspiring to have children learn these very old songs, to keep the traditions going!
Some hymns have tunes from folksongs so I include some of them here (eg, "Morning has broken"). The Community Choristers usually include folksongs in their concerts; so far, folk songs that represent English, Irish, Scottish, and Polish folk songs or folk tunes. See links below. Come back because we will be adding more!
Further Reading:
Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa. Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel. Chapter Six: "Folk Music in the Novels of Thomas Hardy." Ohio University Press, 2002.Lloyd, A. L. Folk Song in England. New York, 1967.
Sing Sol Fa, A List of 100 (American) Folk Songs website.
Choir: The Community Choristers
Pictured: 2024 inaugural choir of the Community Choristers. All pictures and audio recordings used with parental permission.
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