Monday, March 11, 2013

Who Gets to be Liberated? Questions on the Modern Social Power of Traditional Song




 Whenever I think about social politics and folk song, I immediately think about the popular ballad “The Rain and Snow.”

It was collected by Cecil Sharp in his rambles in North Carolina in 1916, and has resurfaced several times via other musicians and source singers including Obray Ramsey, Dillard Chandler (both of NC), the Grateful Dead, Pentangle and many others.
In those versions, a husband who is repeatedly abused by his wife resorts to killing her.

Commonly, the homicide verse runs like this:
“Oh she came into the room, where she met her fatal doom
And I’m not gonna be treated this a’way.”

The first time I heard the song, the lyrics were from the perspective of a wife being abused by her husband. Being used to the version, I was surprised when I finally heard the song most people know. I realized I had viewed the version I knew as a story of liberation, though admittedly a dark one. To hear it from the perspective of an abused man killing a woman created an air of unease in me. It made me realize my own biases about gendered experience. In the world of the song, it was reasonable to me for the woman to kill her husband, but not for the husband to kill his wife, though both suffered from the same abuse.  To me, the wife “freeing” herself from her husband had a modern appeal in an old guise. But it seemed to me that the husband killing his wife was something most people probably viewed as staying in the old, tragic mythos of ballads, in which it’s expected for men to do away with female lovers in such a manner.

This experience alongside many other has me constantly thinking about the social power of traditional song. What songs get left in because of their relevance to modern politics? What songs get left out because the context is considered inappropriate by modern standards? When do songs with potentially racist/sexist etc. lyrics stay popular, because they’re protected by a privileged sense of historical value? And how do all these decisions change our perception of the past?

This is a HUGE topic, and one that I wish was being discussed all the time. I thought I’d throw out a few examples of songs from the Robert’s Collection as an entry way into exploring these questions. This post just tugs on the tail of the elephant in the room, so to speak, and readers are welcome to leave comments.

One piece I’ve quite enjoyed learning while here in Berea was shared by a man named Dan Wilder from East Pineville, KY. It’s called “Marching Away with the Spaniards:”
“A pretty little miss came steppin’ down stairs
Pulling off her slippers
Putting on her high shoes
To go marching away with the Spaniards.

Thursday night her father came home
Inquiring for his daughter
The only words that he could hear
She’s gone across the water.”

It’s a nice variation on the “Gypsy Laddie,” (Child #200). In this version, instead of a wife and mother leaving her lord, a young woman is leaving her family. Her father pursues, only to reach her on the shore as she sails away. He pleads for her to come back but the young woman happily declares she’ll stay with the Spaniards.

This song appeals to me as one to teach and sing with contemporary audiences, much for the same reasons that versions of Gypsy Laddie have remained popular:  because contemporary listeners can interpret it as a tale of female liberation.
In its history being sung, this piece has undoubtedly meant to compel women because it painted a picture of independence during periods of gender-based repression. But other versions of the Gypsy Laddie tell us that singers were of divided opinions about the lady who leaves her husband, and at times starkly conscientious of class realities. Jean Ritchie sings that the young woman’s clothes become torn and tattered and “Her gypsy found another lass and left her heart a breaking.” In Martin Carthy's “Seven Yellow Gypsies,” the lord hangs all the gypsies.  Despite how well known these versions are, I feel that modern performers rarely choose to sing them, preferring the positive ending (see Chieftans/Nickel Creek, Watterson:Carthy).

But when the “liberation” version is chosen to be perpetuated, what are we forgetting? Not all singers thought leaving the lord was the right choice. To leave out the other versions is to only tell one part of the story, to in part, forget the many voices that make these songs live so many different lives because our past is full of diverse experiences. Our concept of the past becomes homogenous.

And yet , I don’t think it’s contradictory that there are plenty of songs I’d gladly see gone from oral tradition. For example, a song often called “Bachelor Boy” or “Devilish Mary.” A version of this was sung by the Couches and comes up regularly in transcripts submitted to Roberts from students and associates. A man marries a wife. The wife exhausts him because she talks incessantly, and in some cases swears and curses. The new husband goes, cuts a switch, and beats her to death. The Couch version says he beat her so hard “her tongue it rattled like a clapper in a bell.” Wife-beating has long been used as a humorous element in many other songs in English tradition, and just two generations ago, this song was still considered funny. Surely one can distinguish that it is useful to know this song existed, but that singing it would be in poor taste to most modern audiences? And yet, I think a mistake that is often made in singing communities is confusing reverence for the culture of song-singing, and reverence for the song itself.

I often feel a double standard is presented to me in traditional singing communities. Some ballads, such as “Bachelor Boy,” would never meet approval in modern context. And yet, some songs survive because of a sense that the community is “over” the issue, or the issue doesn’t exist.  Consider “Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies” (link here for some common lyrics). This song, at its root, may be about the hurt of betrayal in love, but it makes a pretty clear statement about the inherent manipulation that men bring to relationships. So why does this song still appeal to me when I’ve had no less than three conversations recently with men who’ve been terribly hurt by their female partner’s  patriarchal assumptions that they cannot feel deeply? The liberal and radical communities I’ve been in often assume that gender issues have been resolved, that everyone is being treated equally. And I think that’s one reason a song like this one keeps being sung without any discussions around its meaning. I feel this piece has even been re-contextualized into a feminist narrative. And yet if one were to challenge the song’s philosophy, respect for its inherent wisdom as an old folk ballad might be toted over the fact that the song speaks to very real cultural assumptions that men always hurt, and women can only be wounded.

Sometimes blatantly racist songs are sung under the guise of “historic value.” Moving off the ballad path and into shape note tradition, “Whitestown,”#211 in the Sacred Harp, is a good example. The song proudly promotes ideas of manifest destiny with the first lines reading, “Where nothing dwelt but beasts of prey, or men as fierce and wild as they, He (God) bids th’oppressed and poor repair, And build them towns and cities there.” I doubt most singers would comfortably compare native peoples to wild and fierce beasts in their day-to-day conversations. But because native peoples have so little self-reputation in this country, the song continues to be sung. And through defaulting to an excuse of the song as “historic,” the present reality of native struggles is put away into the past as well.

I’m not saying it’s easy to make choices around what songs cultivate a healthy culture, but I’m saying it’s a question that should be asked, and we don’t ask it enough. There are plenty of songs I consider beautiful, that I love to sing, that still exhibit values that I don’t identify with. It's confusing, because the sound of the song itself holds meaning to me, the melody or the tonality resonate more than the words. But that's why we have to challenge ourselves to move beyond the comfort of what we already know, to innovate, and cultivate evolving material that still keeps much of the power of these older songs. Let’s revere the culture of song-singing. Let’s honor the intuition to sing, and to tell our own stories through song. Let’s learn about the past through the varied stories of our ancestors.  But let’s not let a song pass unexplored purely because it wears the cloak of tradition


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