Some Folk ll Never Eat a Skunk but Then Again Some Folk ll
Similar all good stories, folk music is largely almost 3 things: sex, expiry and politics. At that place might be a lot of carousing along the way, and at that place may exist some word of farming or the occasional comedic skit to tickle your fancy, but the principal themes remain constant and they are always delivered with rude gusto.
Then, as nosotros head towards this twelvemonth'due south Radio 2 Folk Awards, here are 10 examples of songs that go beyond the premises of human decency (and are all the meliorate for it):
Warning: contains some adult themes.
i. Died for Love
Matters of the eye take a addiction of turning red, raw and bloody in traditional songs, and so it goes with Died for Honey, also known every bit A Sailor's Life, Sweet William, and Willie the Bold Sailor Boy (and performed by everyone from Fairport Convention to The Watersons). It's a tale of a woman pining for her truthful dearest who has ready out to sea and not returned. Desperate to detect him, she sets out to bounding main herself and meets the Queen's ship. She asks if they have seen William, and after some give-and-take over the cut and colour of his glaze and pilus, they tell her he has drowned.
Some versions of the vocal end here, but Died for Love (as performed here by Martin and Eliza Carthy) continues, with a verse in which her father enters her bedroom to notice her "hanging past a rope", with a note fastened to her breast asking him to bury her with marble stones at her head and feet, with a snow-white dove in the centre, "only to let the world know that I died for dear."
two. The Brutal Female parent
This queasy tale of infanticide has been sung past anybody from Cecilia Costello to The Dubliners (who recorded a version called Weile Weile Waile) and Nancy Kerr. Information technology concerns a adult female who kills her 2 new-built-in children with a pocketknife. But the blade becomes unwashable - the more she wipes information technology, the "more ruby-red" it grows. She then meets ii babies in the entrance to a church building, and tells them she'd care for them wonderfully if they were hers. They turn out to be the ghosts of her children, who tell her that she'southward bound for hell.
iii. The Unquiet Grave
Too known as 1 True Love and Cold Blows the Air current (as performed above by Bellowhead), this is a vocal of mourning that takes a nighttime turn into gothic nihilism. A woman throws herself on the grave of her true love, drastic for one concluding buss to relieve her grief. Her passion is such that, after a yr-long graveside vigil, her human rises up to speak to her, and so that he tin can truly rest in peace. She begs for a osculation, but he warns her that his lips are "common cold as the clay" and that a kiss from him would end her life too.
In the Shirley Collins version, he then explains that their love, while it was once "the fairest flower that ever was seen / Has withered to the stalk", going on to add: "The stalk is withered dry, truthful love / So must our hearts disuse / So rest yourself content, my beloved / Till God calls y'all away". Which is the kind of stark message from the hereafter that you never really got in Ghost.
four. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
This account of the death of a black hotel worker is drawn from contemporary history - Bob Dylan wrote it almost as shortly as the courtroom case had ended - and yet it has a theme that runs every bit far back through folk music history as the texts allow us to see. It'southward about people in the higher echelons of society abusing those who are lower downwardly and appearing to get away with it. In this case, it's 24-year-former tobacco plantation owner William Zantzinger, who rapped Hattie Carroll with his cane for non serving his drink fast enough. She collapsed and died of heart failure, and he received a six-month jail sentence.
In this documentary, made by Howard Sounes, author of Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, we find out more nigh the case from starting time manus witnesses, and even hear from Zantzinger himself, who turns out not to be much of a Dylan fan.
5. Common cold Haily Rainy Night
There are plenty of folk songs that warn young women against the reputation-shredding advances of lecherous men, from the directly O Soldier Won't You lot Ally Me to the poetic Let No Human being Steal Your Thyme. Cold Haily Rainy Night (or Common cold Accident and a Rainy Dark, Let Me In This Ae Nicht and even The Laird o' Windy Wa's) has retained its dominance as a stark contrast between what people will say to become what they want, and how they will behave once they get it.
The vocal - every bit performed by Jeannie Robertson, Steeleye Bridge, Planxty and The Imagined Village - tells the story of a handsome soldier or traveller stuck outside the window of a young woman on a rotten evening. He begs to come within to become warm ("oh my lid is frozen to my head, my feet are like two lumps of lead"), and despite the risk of discovery, she somewhen lets him in and one affair leads to another. She proposes marriage, but he's non interested, puts his chapeau back on and heads out into the storm, leaving her reputation in tatters.
6. The Knoxville Girl
Likewise known as Hanged I Shall Be, The Oxford Tragedy, The Oxford Girl, The Wexford Girl, The Butcher Boy and many others, this song - variants of which date back to the 1700s - is one of many murder ballads in the folk canon that follow a similar pattern. A man spots a woman he likes the look of, and then he takes her to a remote location to pitch woo, but kills her instead. So the guilt starts.
In The Knoxville Girl, sung by, among others, The Lemonheads, Elvis Costello and Nick Cave (who knows a thing or two about murder ballads), the singer hits the object of his affections with a stick, many times, although earlier variants accept her stabbed with a knife, and then drowned for good measure. Each version tends to end in a like fashion, with the vocalist realising he's bound for prison, and perchance the gallows, and also nearly certainly for eternal damnation.
7. Matty Groves
Settle down, this is what they call a page-turner. Matty Groves (equally sung here by Ben Nicholls) is the story of a young man who catches the eye of the local lord'south wife - in Sandy Denny'southward version of the song with Fairport Convention, he'southward Lord Donald, just the names and song titles change often. Matty at first refuses her advances, and then capitulates, just one of Lord Donald'due south servants has told his primary.
Outraged, the Lord finds the couple in bed, and insists that Matty fight. Matty, who is naked, strikes the first blow, but is immediately killed, and Lord Donald then asks his wife which of the 2 she prefers. She says dead Matty, so Lord Donald kills her too, and buries the two lovers in the same grave, with her on top, because she's posher. Run across? Sex, death and politics.
8. Oh Death
Also known as Conversations with Decease, this song comes from the Appalachian mountains, wellspring of country music. Written largely by Lloyd Chandler, there are two key versions (amidst many popular covers), one in the late 1920s past banjo thespian Dock Boggs, and the a capella version in 2000 by bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, for the film O Brother, Where Art Yard?
It'southward the song of a drastic, ill person begging for their life, with Death himself boasting that he will shut the body down, and why? Simple: "I'm Expiry I come up to take the soul / Leave the body and leave it cold / To draw upwardly the mankind off of the frame / Dirt and worm both have a claim."
9. Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire
As Joan Bakewell explains in this written report, the 1960s musical Oh! What A Lovely War retold the history of the Showtime World War using popular songs of the fourth dimension every bit a darkly comic style of satirically retelling the story of the conflict. But this song from the 1918 trenches didn't make the cut, probably because it portrays the bureaucracy of army life in quite a fell calorie-free. Each verse offers a hazard to observe where representatives of a particular rank might be found - from sergeant downwardly to private - with the officers described as being variously "lying on the canteen floor" to "miles and miles behind the line". By dissimilarity, the poor privates (or battalion, depending on the version of the song) tin be institute "hanging on the old barbed wire".
The song was popular with the soldiers (simply non their commanding officers) during the latter days of the state of war, and was recreated by Chumbawamba for their a capella collection of insurrectionary erstwhile folk tunes, English Insubordinate Songs 1381–1984.
10. On Morecambe Bay
As nosotros've seen, folk music works exceptionally well at putting across the personal side of a story with political ramifications, and this is just as true when it's sung well-nigh a recent upshot. In 2004, at least 21 illegally employed Chinese migrant workers died while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay, when they were caught by the incoming tide. The man side of this preventable tragedy was captured in the song On Morecambe Bay, by Kevin Littlewood, which has been memorably covered by Christy Moore, thank you to the intervention of Mike Harding (as Christy reveals in this interview with Cerys Matthews).
From the first verse, he finds himself wishing he could have stepped forward to warn them, the way "our mothers" warned local children, that yous tin can't outrun the tide, and so introduces this poetic refrain: "For the tide is The Devil, it volition run you out of jiff / Race you to the seashore, chase you to your expiry / The tide is the very Devil and the Devil has its day / On the lonely cockle banks of Morecambe Bay."
Related links
mattesonreaps1941.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/8beeaac5-064c-4406-9e85-d42cebf9a53b
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