Folk Music Journal: Volume 12 Number 4

Volume 12 Number 4 (2024) contains the following pieces 

Articles

Catherine Hiebert Kerst and Brian Peters Return to the Appalachian Mountains: Maud Karpeles and Sidney Robertson Cowell’s Song Collecting Expedition, 1950

In 1950, Maud Karpeles embarked on a song collecting expedition to the Appalachian Mountains with the American scholar and fieldworker Sidney Robertson Cowell. Their plan was to retrace the journeys made by Karpeles with Cecil Sharp over thirty years earlier and to revisit some of the singers they had met previously, with the aim of making tape recordings on a machine supplied by the Library of Congress. Although many of the people they targeted were dead or otherwise indisposed, they succeeded in recording fifteen survivors or close relatives of singers encountered by Sharp, and a few unknown to him. Their accounts of the trip, in diaries and letters, reveal personal tensions and a fundamentally different view of the nature of folk song, Karpeles’s purist approach contrasting with Cowell’s view of a dynamic tradition. Karpeles revisited the mountains in 1955 with Evelyn Wells and succeeded in adding to the total of recordings. The material they collected provides a valuable snapshot of Appalachian ballad singing at this time.

Joe Oldaker Mrs Fowler’s Polesworth Morris Troupe: Mary Neal’s Vision Achieved?

This study recounts the history of the Polesworth Morris Troupe throughout its life from 1910 to 1915, with details of performances and repertoire. The troupe’s relationship with the teaching of the Espérance Club is examined, casting light on the practices of the latter in instructing morris, not just in Polesworth. It is suggested that the Polesworth Troupe created something approaching Mary Neal’s ideal of ‘the people’ taking up and performing traditional music and dance.

Ian Russell Telling the Truth in Song: Subversion and Injustice in the Ballad of ‘Green the Ganger’

In this essay, I want to revisit the theme of ‘truth in song’, identified by Herbert Halpert in his seminal 1939 article. Since songs first entered print, tension has existed between the event as related and the documented facts of the incident to which a song refers. Twentieth-century folk song scholars have widened this dialectic on the nature of truth in a song text to encompass other key factors, namely context and performance, as a means of understanding a song’s function and meaning, thereby acknowledging the importance of the extratextual information that certain singers attach to particular songs. The notorious 1840 Glasgow Railway Murder, to which the song ‘Green the Ganger’ (Roud 30616) relates, still resonates today through scholarly articles and documentary dramatization. Just as the performance of the song ‘McCaffery’ (Roud 1148) was perceived as undermining the military establishment, so a rendition of ‘Green the Ganger’ might provide the flashpoint for unrest among Irish migratory workers in the construction industry. This paper reflects on the power of truth in such songs in the light of the performer and their audience.

David Hopkin Lace Songs and Culture Wars: A Nineteenth-Century Flemish Village Soap Opera

Lacemakers sang while working at their pillows; this stereotype is amply confirmed in collections of folk songs made from lacemakers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not just in England but also in France, Germany, and, above all, Belgium. While the habit continued into adult life, lacemakers first contracted the practice in the institutions where lace skills were taught, such as lace schools. In Catholic Europe, lace schools were usually under some kind of ecclesiastical authority, which put them in the front line of the nineteenth-century culture wars. Church and state, liberals and conservatives, battled over the purposes and means of education, and particularly girls’ education. Consequently, the repertoire of songs used in lace schools became a fraught political issue.

This article considers one attempt to shape young minds through song. Constant Duvillers was the priest of Middelburg in East Flanders, in the newly established kingdom of Belgium, during the crisis years of the ‘Hungry Forties’. Like hundreds of other members of the Catholic clergy, his response to growing poverty was to set up a lace school. He also wrote songs for use by the girls, which were taken up by other Flemish lace schools. All of Duvillers’s songs were set in and around the Middelburg lace school and concern recognizable persons and actual events. They read like a soap opera, as an increasingly exasperated Duvillers cajoled, harangued, or outright insulted his pupils and their parents. This village drama provides a microcosm of the nineteenth century’s culture wars: it illustrates the difficulties faced by the clergy as they attempted to impose their vision of education, proper gender roles, and the social order on their parishioners. Yet one measure of Duvillers’s lasting influence is that several of his songs survived in lacemakers’ repertoires until the mid-twentieth century.

Notes

A Treasure Trove of Welsh Traditional Music: The Archives of Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney at the National Library of Wales Nia Mai Daniel

The Goathland Plough Stots Gordon Ridgewell

Correspondence

Angela Carter and the Folk Song Collectors 

Cotswold Arts and Crafts and Folk Music

Book Reviews – Books

The Ancient English Morris Dance (Heaney) Matthew Simons

A Norfolk Rhapsody: Ralph Vaughan Williams in King’s Lynn (Bennett and James) Katie Howson 

The Making of a Tradition: East Lancashire Clog Dancing (Tracey) Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe 

American Song and Struggle from Columbus to World War II (Kaufman) Michael Pickering 

Vaughan Williams (Saylor) Tiffany Hore

Thirsty Work and Other Legacies of Folk Song (Roud and Atkinson, eds) Andy Turner

Carnivals, Contests and Coronations: A Social History of Morris Dancing in Trafford before the Second World War (Nelson) Michael Heaney 

Angela Carter and Folk Music: ‘Invisible Music’, Prose and the Art of Canorography (Paulusma) Sophie Parkes-Nield 

Alan Lomax, the South, and the American Folk Music Revival, 1933–1969 (Lenz) Elaine Bradtke 

The British Folk Revival (Brocken) Jon Boden 

Ballad Hunting with Max Hunter: Stories of an Ozark Folksong Collector (Nelson) Eleanor Rodes

Stepping On: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Stepping in Dance (Bennett, ed.) Chris Metherell

Animal Guising and the Kentish Hooden Horse: An Exhibition at Maidstone Museum (Frost) Stephen Rowley 

Celebrating the International Council for Traditional Music: Reflections on the First Seven Decades (Pettan, Ceribašic, and Niles, eds) Paul Cowdell 

Folksongs Sung in Ulster (Morton) Len Graham 

Gude and Godlie Ballatis Noted (Duffin, ed.) Steve Roud 

Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe, 1500–1900 (McIlvenna) David Atkinson 

Cultural Dance in Australia: Essays on Performance Contexts Beyond the Pale (Mollenhauer) Theresa Jill Buckland 

Footed Upon the Sod: An Introduction to and Celebration of the Anglo-Scottish Triple Hornpipe (Saxton) Chris Partington 

Chris Droney of Bell Harbour and the Tradition of the Concertina in North Clare (Worrall and Branch) Vic Gammon 

Community-Based Traditional Music in Scotland: A Pedagogy of Participation (Miller) Matt Price 

England’s Folk Revival and the Problem of Identity in Traditional Music (Williams) Alice Little 

Ron Edwards and the Fight for Australian Tradition (McKenry) Martyn Wyndham-Read

Obituary

John Brian Graham Dave Townsend

Cover illustration: ‘The Sugarloaf Sheltons’, Carmen, North Carolina, 12 August 1955. Courtesy of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Editor: David Atkinson