IV.

The Songs

The style traits described above characterize regions and countries. Most folk tunes themselves, while spreading as variants, remain in their homelands. Occasionally, however, they pass from one country to another, their style changing in the process. For example, singers may perform a song solo in one country, but in a chorus in another. A tune may use a pentatonic (five-tone) scale in one country and a diatonic major scale (scale with no sharps or flats) in another. Indeed, very similar tunes are found in nations as far apart as Spain and Hungary, the variations reflecting the local style of each country. This relationship of similar tunes in distant communities is difficult to trace. The similarities may be the result of the tunes migrating from region to region, or they may occur simply because musicians composing folk music are bound to produce similar tunes sometimes.

Within a single country, however, it is often possible to identify those tunes that appear to be related. They all seem to have come from a single parent tune passed on by oral tradition in community get-togethers. A group of such related tunes is called a tune family. Comparisons of folk song variations can reveal how a tune family may have developed. Tunes may be shortened, for example. When the four-line 'Pretty Mohea' of Anglo-American tradition became 'On Top of Old Smoky,' it seems to have lost its first two lines. A shortened version may then have new lines added. Or, in the interior of a musical line, the second of two contrasting bits of melody may be forgotten and replaced by a repetition of the first. A tune may also borrow a line from a completely unrelated family. For example, in Czech folk songs, which often use the form aaba, the line b may move to other tunes as an independent unit.

The number of tune families in a given body of folk music ranges widely. Hungarian folk music seems to have hundreds. In Iran, however, each genre of text, such as songs about heroic warlords, seems to be associated with one type of melody and thus the total number of families is very small. American scholar Samuel Bayard has claimed that some 40 or 50 families dominate Anglo-American folk music, and that 7 of these families account for the vast majority of songs.

A ballad, with an established story, may be sung consistently with one tune and its variants. Typically, however, it will also be sung to other, unrelated tunes from several families. Because these texts, such as ballad stories, disperse broadly, they are held in common by a number of countries in Europe and the Americas. The same dispersal is true of members of a tune family—they are sung with a variety of texts. However, texts and tunes do not usually move together. For example, the text to the ballad 'Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight,' common in English folk music, is found all over Europe, but in each country it is sung to a distinct group of tunes.

The large number of tunes in a typical folk music repertory is the basis for various systems of tune classification. Because oral tradition is so unpredictable, however, what remains constant when a tune changes differs markedly from culture to culture. In English folk song, for example, contour (the general outline of melodic movement) remains constant, whereas in Hungarian folk music, the consistent elements are the rhythm and the configuration of final notes of the several (usually four) phrases. Because of such differences, there is no satisfactory way to classify all the tunes that are related members of one family.