Folk Music

V

Types of Songs

There are many types of folk songs, including ballads, epics, folk theater tunes, songs that address important occasions, work songs, love songs, children’s songs, and religious songs. Each of these types has a specific purpose.

Ballads are songs that use a set of stanzas to tell stories involving one main incident. 'Barbara Allen' and 'Lord Randall,' both sung in countless variants, are two of the best-known ballads in the English-speaking world. American scholar Francis James Child collected, classified, and numbered (because variants have no standard titles) these and more than 300 other English and Scottish ballads. These songs are known as Child ballads, after their collector: 'Barbara Allen' is Child 78, 'Lord Randall' is Child 12, and so on. Child ballads constitute an especially large proportion of the body of folk songs in the Appalachian Mountain region of the East Coast of the United States. Sung mostly to old tunes that are frequently pentatonic, they show little influence from art or popular music. Modern ballads from these regions, often circulated in printed form on large sheets called broadsides and then passed on orally, frequently use tunes in major or minor keys. They are often sung with instrumental accompaniment and are closer to popular song and modern Protestant hymn styles. Their texts concern unhappy love, murders, events of war, and tragedies such as railroad wrecks. In contrast to the Child ballads, broadside ballads are specific and consistent in giving names, places, and dates. At one time they served as a way of spreading news. Although English ballads are best known in North America, the ballad as a type is found in all Western cultures.

Another type of narrative folk song is the epic, a drawn-out account focusing on the adventures of a hero. Found mainly in the Balkans, Russia, Finland, and the Middle East, epics are usually organized in lines or couplets rather than in stanzas. Best known are the Serbian epics telling about conflict between Christians and Muslims from the 1200s to the 1600s. Many of these epics take several hours to be told, and singers partially improvise with the use of melodic formulas (preset musical patterns). In Iran, epics concern Persian kings before the Islamic conquest of Iran and the deeds of the early leaders of Islam.

Folk theater can be found throughout Asia and in parts of Europe. Similar to medieval mystery plays, this form of theater is exemplified by narrations of the Christmas story. In folk theater, the style of the music is typically simple, involving repetitive melodies with short formulas and few tones.

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A large group of folk songs may be called calendric—that is, they accompany rituals that mark major events in life or in the year's cycles. Included are songs sung at weddings, funerals, births, and the onset of puberty. In the West some calendric songs mark annual events that date from pre-Christian times, such as those celebrating summer and winter solstice, planting, and harvest. Others celebrate Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter. Many calendric songs are extremely old, using short forms and restricted scales, and they are often associated with instruments such as rattles, one-tone wooden trumpets, and flutes without finger holes.

Another category of folk music involves songs for crises such as war and illness. Although songs of this kind were probably common at one time, they are rare now.

Many work songs exist in Western cultures, especially in the folk music of African cultures in the Americas. People sing some work songs as rhythmic accompaniment to repetitive labor. Songs with texts that concern agricultural activities and other kinds of work can build the solidarity of the working group. Within this category are sea chanteys, cowboy songs, and railroad songs, many of them ballads.

Additional types of folk songs include love songs, marching songs (once sung by soldiers on long marches), and songs of general entertainment. In the Balkans, for example, young people entertain themselves with songs while taking walks on holidays. Children's songs include lullabies, game songs, counting-out rhymes, and nursery rhyme songs. Another type is religious folk songs, which are generally hymns sung in rural churches.

Some folk songs have no words, only a tune. The main purpose of this instrumental folk music is to accompany dance and marching. Occasionally dancing is accompanied by singing. In Scandinavia, narrative ballads were once used for dancing.

VI

Instruments

Each folk culture has a large number of instruments. Some, such as bagpipes, are found over wide areas. Others, such as the Sardinian launeddas, a set of three reed pipes played by one musician, are used in limited areas. Most folk cultures throughout the world have several basic instruments in common. Because folk instruments have been a part of human society for so long, it is difficult to know if they developed in one place and then spread, or if they developed separately in many cultures. These instruments include rattles, simple flutes, wooden trumpets, Jew's harps, and drums. Such instruments have long been used as part of rituals and by children as toys. Some instruments migrated from one culture to another. An example is the hammered dulcimer, which probably originated in Iran and is now found in Western Europe as well as in Hungary (where it is known as the cimbalom). Other instruments are particular to one culture, such as fiddles made from wooden shoes in Belgium, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands. Many instruments were originally developed in urban cultures—including the clarinet, double bass, and accordion—and were adopted for folk music without much change. Other instruments originated in art music but later were used primarily by folk musicians. Examples include guitars, mandolins, dulcimers, and the hurdy-gurdy.

Many folk music instruments are played solo, but ensembles are also found. In general, folk ensembles resemble chamber music ensembles rather than orchestras in that no two instruments play precisely the same part. They include nonprofessional versions of art music ensembles, such as brass bands and Scandinavian groups of fiddles. Particularly common in central Europe is a combination of two violins with double bass. Many other groups combine one melody-producing instrument with drums and other percussion. In folk music of southern Asia and the Middle East, ensembles of drums and wind instruments—particularly oboes—appear. In some instances one person plays two instruments, as in the pipe-and-tabor (flute-and-drum) combination of Western Europe and South America and the violin and mouth organ in Hungary.

VII

Folk Music in the Modern World

The picture presented thus far applies best to folk music as it has existed in past centuries and in the 20th century in a few isolated valleys and village cultures. However, most folk cultures changed greatly during the 20th century, especially after 1950. First via the introduction of print, then radio and phonograph records, later through television, and finally the Internet and other electronic forms of communication, many small towns and villages have acquired access to the same cultural materials and styles once available only in cities. The musical life and ideals of rural folk today are almost identical with those of urban people. To the extent that it still exists as a separate category of music, folk music has become a phenomenon of urban music. The concepts of ethnicity and regionality once intimately associated with folk music have changed, as almost all people have access to the sounds of folk music from many nations. Today, almost everyone can hear almost any kind of music.

While this availability makes the typical musical experience of each person potentially more varied, it also forces a kind of sameness on the world’s musical culture. The modification of many folk instruments to make them compatible with modern concert formats and electronic equipment also reduces cultural differences. The combination of musical styles from various parts of the world with European-based instruments, harmonies, and song forms in the world music or worldbeat movements has modified greatly the concept of folk music.

These developments of the late 20th century had antecedents in the early part of the century. Members of folk communities from rural Eastern Europe and small-town Appalachia, for example, moved to cities and continued their traditions in changed form. European ethnic groups now living in American cities keep up their traditions at festivals and parties to preserve their ethnic integrity by singing songs that once accompanied farm labor.

A series of folk music revivals beginning in the 1930s brought the performance of traditional folk songs—and of new songs composed in imitation of folk music—to the middle classes of American and Western European cities, as well as to university campuses.

Dissenting social and political movements, largely of the left (in North America) but also of the radical right (in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy), made use of folk music as a rallying cry at various times in the 20th century. In the United States, the liberal movements of the 1940s, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and the movement against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s produced songs that used folk melodies and imitated the styles of folk songs. Performers also used folk music to publicize environmental conservation efforts, as when American singer Judy Collins recorded a whaling ballad against the background sounds of whales. Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan are among the best-known of the folk singers produced by these movements. European liberation movements in Northern Ireland, among the Basques of northern Spain, and among various ethnic groups from central and eastern Europe have also produced major folk song performers. The Irish group called the Chieftains is an example from the 1980s.

The use of folk music for political purposes was particularly prominent in Eastern Europe and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Soon after World War II (1939-1945), governments in these areas founded special schools to train folk musicians who would then work as concert artists. Musicians also modified folk instruments in imitation of the families of instruments in art music. Thus in Russia sets of soprano, alto, cello-like tenor, and double-bass balalaikas and domras (plucked instrument similar to mandolins) were developed, and folk orchestras imitating symphony orchestras represented both Russian nationalism and Communist populism. After 1950, Eastern European nations raised money to support their folk traditions through festivals and competitions. In Slovakia, for example, many villages created folk ensembles that practice and perform songs and dances used at weddings, to accompany work, or in festivals. Some folk musicians enter national and international competitions. In the 1990s the female choir of the Bulgarian State Radio, using folk-derived vocal techniques, gave a world-famous concert tour that influenced composers and popular music performers throughout the world.

The scholarly and analytical study of folk music became thoroughly established in Europe and the Americas beginning in the 1960s. This growing field of the study of music cultures is called ethnomusicology. It is not only the study of folk music that has crossed cultures, however. Tourism has had a major impact on folk music culture in almost all parts of Europe, encouraging the continued maintenance of traditions while at the same time causing them to be modified to meet entertainment expectations of international tourists.

The borders separating folk music from other kinds of music have become less significant, and many people have mourned the loss of distinctions in world musical culture. Fear that folk music would disappear was already being expressed in the early 19th century when collectors first began to comb the European countryside for relics of the people’s ancient music. Folk music has continued to change in style, method of transmission, and social context; however, as a worldwide phenomenon it showed no sign of disappearing as the 20th century drew to a close.

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