Folk songs

Robert Burns and the Lasses–Two Love Songs

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Jean Armour at age 57, 26 years after Burns’ death. Image accessed via Wikipedia.

It’s always a bit of a facer to track down some lovely, idealized idea about a person or artwork and find out the real story. So it’s been with Robert Burns and two of his famous love songs, “O My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose” and “I’ll Ay Call In by Yon Town.” Was he a tender, faithful lover who paid the object of his desire these tributes? Does he stand as an example of proper behavior to those reading his poetry? Did he . . . well, I think you get the gist: the answer to these and similar questions is a resounding “no.”

When Burns died at age 37 he’d fathered 13 children (that we know of) by four different women and had love affairs with a number of others. The only woman he married, though, was Jean Armour. Were she alive today she’d probably be labeled as an “enabler;” she even went so far as to bring up Burns’ daughter by another woman who was born the same month as his son with Jean. As she said, “Oor Rab needed twa wives.” Just to sketch out the relationship between Jean and Burns takes up a fair amount of space. He met her in 1785 when Burns was 26. She quickly became pregnant by him, but her father refused to let the couple marry because of Burns’ poor financial prospects. He went off and got involved with someone else while Jean gave birth to twins. The couple reconciled and married after “many bizarre turnings” and yet another set of twins. She seems to have remained faithful, and her last child by Burns was born on the day of his funeral. He was an on-again, off-again presence in her life. I can’t imagine what they talked about when he was home!

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The Mysterious and Haunting “Skye Boat Song”—Tragic History told in Beautiful Music

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Isle of Skye, Photo by Piotr Musioł on Unsplash

You’ll probably think as you read the lyrics below that they sound familiar, and you’d be right. This song has had a very long and popular life, starting with its first publication in the 1880’s. The most recent incarnation has been as the theme song for the long-running drama Outlander, based on a series of novels by Diana Gabaldon. I’m not going to deal with anything outside of the actual historical origins of the song, as there’s plenty to say just in that area.

The short version of the story behind the lyrics is that it centers around the Battle of Culloden in 1746, in which the Scots were soundly defeated by a much-larger English force. The battle had come about through an attempted restoration of the Stuart dynasty to Britain’s throne, with the Scottish forces being led by Charles Stuart, or “Bonnie Prince Charlie” (and often referred to in the material below as “BPC.”) It’s an incredibly complicated bit of history that I won’t go into in detail here. If you’d like to get a more thorough overview of the events referred to in the song, let me direct you to a post I wrote several years ago that tells the story behind yet another very famous song associated with this battle: “I’ll Take the High Road and You’ll Take the Low Road.”

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What’s with the Twelve Days of Christmas?

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I remember back in elementary school being teased a bit by some Jewish classmates about the superiority of Hanukkah over Christmas: “You only have one day to get presents, but we have eight.” I’m sure I wasn’t quick-witted enough to mention the plethora of gift-giving in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with its extra days of celebration. So here’s the information I didn’t have back then.

But first, before you read any further, you must watch the absolutely definitive performance of this song by none other than John Denver and the Muppets. Here’s the link (sorry about the horrible low-res quality):

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How Can I Explain the Backstory of “How Can I Keep from Singing?”?

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Image by Lukas Bieri from Pixabay

I think this is the second time I’ve had a double question mark in a post title. Always up for a grammatical challenge, that’s me. (That’s I?)

Anyway, when my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, recently rehearsed this piece the conductor said, “This is one of the most-frequently arranged songs around.” There’s no way to definitively quantify the number of arrangements out there for any piece, but it does seem to be quite popular. As usual I’m more interested in the words than the music, but the tune is truly lovely, written by a Baptist minister, Robert Lowry, in the mid-1800’s. I was interested to see that his three other most-famous hymns, “Christ Arose,” “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus,” and “Shall We Gather at the River?” are all songs I’ve sung in church myself. I love, love, love “Shall We Gather” and always sort of thought that it was a folk song or spiritual.

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How do we know that “She Moved Through the Fair” is a true folk song?

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Image accessed via the “Why Donegal?” Facebook page; no source given.

We know this because it has so many different versions, points of origin, and people claiming to have had a part in its creation. Any time you have a song that simply refuses to be pinned down, rest assured that it can truly be categorized as “folk.” If there is a known author, then the most you can say is that the piece is “in the style of” a folk song. I have been fascinated to read the Wikipedia article on this piece; the various claims and counterclaims are so multi-branching that they almost form a spider’s web.

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The Wild and Wacky World of Wassailing

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no image attribution given on the website https://www.manmadediy.com/

Oh my goodness! If you’ve read many of my posts on this site you’re probably familiar with my saying, “Well, I thought this was a simple song . . .” But nowhere would this phrase be more appropriate than it is here, as I attempt to explain the concept of “wassailing” and then apply those ideas to two traditional Christmas songs that are often performed during the holidays, “Gloucestershire Wassail (Wassail, Wassail, All Over the Town)” and “Here We Come A-Wassailing,” with a bonus mention of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which doesn’t directly mention wassailing but which contains wassail-adjacent ideas as you’ll see below.

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Who’s “She,” and What Mountain is She Comin’ Round?

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Picture This is another one of those endlessly variable folk songs with about a hundred verses. You might ask, though, “Okay, but who’s the ‘she’ who’s comin’ round the mountain?” Good question. I originally made an assumption here, thinking that this was a literal woman, but she’s not that in the original at all. Guess what ‘she’ actually is? A chariot. That’s right. This song is drawn from a spiritual about the Second Coming of Christ, and the “she” refers to the chariot that “King Jesus” will be riding. As with many spirituals, though, there may be an underlying meaning about freedom and the Underground Railroad.

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Why Is Henry VIII Associated with the Song “Greensleeves,” and Does the Song Have Anything to Do with Sleeves on a Dress? Etc.

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“The Lady Greensleeves” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, By Dante Gabriel Rossetti – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2522302

I am constantly, I mean constantly, realizing that some piece of music I’ve heard all my life is full of unanswered questions. So, honestly, I had never asked myself, ‘Is someone actually wearing green sleeves in “Greensleeves”?’ When I saw this piece on the list for a concert by my own choir, however, I realized that I knew very little about it even though I’ve heard it all my life. The tune is also used for “What Child Is This?” and for one of the songs in the movie How the West Was Won, “I’ll Build You a Home in the Meadow.” So what’s what here?

Let’s start with the whole reason that this piece is seen as having some connection to royalty: the idea that King Henry VIII of England wrote it for the woman he loved, Anne Boleyn, who became his second wife and ultimately lost her head. Alas, my friends. That little idea seems to be a total myth, although it makes a good story. The first public appearance of the song was as a “broadside ballad” in 1580, but Henry had died in 1547, and his pursuit of Anne Boleyn had taken place well before that, in the mid-1520’s. Could he have written the song then, with its only being ublished over 50 years later? Well, of course he could have. Anything could have happened with this song, really. But is there any actual evidence of Henry’s authorship? Not a jot. There’s one glancing reference in another song using the same tune to “King Harries time,” and that’s it.

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Why is there such a swing from merriment to tragedy throughout “Letters from Ireland”?

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“An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of Their Store” by Daniel MacDonald, 1847, public domain.

I just sat down and went through the entire Letters from Ireland book with its arrangements of Irish folk songs by Mark Brymer interspersed with texts, mostly taken from letters written in the relevant historical period. Some are what you’d call “rollicking;” others are very somber, with perhaps “Skibbereen” being the most tragic. So what’s going on here? I’m going to give some general ideas here, and if you find them interesting I’d encourage you to head on over to the page of this website where you can purchase my book that includes a chapter on each of the selections in this fabulous work.

To begin with, let me give you a couple of astoundingly obvious observations:

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Who’s Sylvie, and Why Is She Carrying Water?

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Slaves working in a cotton field. From Tupelo by John H. Aughey.
Slaves working in a cotton field. From Tupelo by John H. Aughey.

Well, Sylvie, or Silvy, or Silvie, may have been a real person, a slave woman on a plantation being implored by someone in the fields to bring him a drink. Or she may have been the aunt of the man who popularized the song. Let’s start with him, the great black folk and blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, who performed throughout the first half of the 20th century, making recordings, holding concerts, and hosting his own radio program for a brief time. He came to the attention of the father/son team of John and Alan Lomax, who traveled the South during the 1930’s recording folk music on “portable aluminum discs” for the Library of Congress. He also spent a fair amount of time in prison for various offenses, including a stabbing, and his nickname was apparently assigned to him there:

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