Folk Music Journal: Volume 12 Number 5
Volume 12 Number 4 (2025) contains the following pieces
Articles
Gibb Schreffler Reclaiming ‘Shenandoah’: A Recovery of Working Chanty Form
‘Shenandoah’ (Roud 324) is counted among the most recognizably ‘American’ traditional songs. Most people are not aware, however, that ‘Shenandoah’ once belonged primarily to the repertoire of the nineteenth-century shipboard work songs called chanties. The impressionable sound of the forms in which it has since been performed, unwittingly, by art and folk revival concert musicians over the last century has colluded with the song’s popular Americana image against its accurate historical perception. Rather than a case of a folk song that transformed through a gradated chain of aural transmission, discrepancies between its prior and current forms may be attributed to infelicities of notators and a concurrent disconnect between work singers, publishers, and concert performers. In particular, twentieth-century folklorists and musicologists, experiencing the song outside of its accompanying context of shipboard performance, were challenged to discern its functional rhythm as a song to which to work. Thus, chief among the sonic issues bearing on modern audiences’ lack of recognition of this song as a chanty, a work song, are those related to the metre and timing of its melody. This essay argues that the only effective way to recover the chanty identity of ‘Shenandoah’ is to envision its performance in the functional manner of that genre. To that end, I synthesize historiography (musicology), formal analysis (music theory), and insights gleaned from experiential fieldwork (ethnomusicology) to recover the song’s virtually lost, working rhythm. My analysis utilizes data from over sixty documents (print, manuscript, and audio) of the melody of ‘Shenandoah’ and practical knowledge of shipboard labour methods.
Peter Harrop Morris, Sword, and Northern Soul: Grappling with ‘Folk’?
As we understand more of the complex histories of morris and sword dancing, the singular designation ‘folk’ becomes problematic. The assertion, whether historical or contemporary, that one kind of dance is definitively ‘folk’ while another kind of dance is ‘not folk’ becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. (Non-folk) Northern Soul dancing is brought to the discussion to highlight the apparent arbitrariness of ‘folk’ as a twentieth-century designation. The article goes on to suggest that the label ‘folk’, while acknowledging its selective and retrospective application, need not apply in perpetuity. It may be possible to describe particular dances as having enjoyed a ‘folk’ period, or a ‘folk’ context, but there have also been lengthy ‘pre-folk’ periods for morris and sword, multiple examples of ‘non-folk’ performance, and an increasingly evident ‘new-folk’ or ‘post-folk’ era.
Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe The Origins of the Couple Dance and Eponymous Melody ‘Varsoviana’
The ‘Varsoviana’ (otherwise Varsouviana’, ‘Varsovienne’, ‘La Va’, ‘Put Your Little Foot’, ‘Shoe the Donkey’, ‘Waltz Vienna’, ‘Turkey Rhubarb’) has proved to be one of the most enduring of all nineteenth-century couple dances. This article explores the musical and choreographic preludes to the arrival, in November 1852, of the ‘Varsoviana’ at the Parisian Salle Paganini. Taking etymologically related sources as its base, particular attention is paid to musical and choreographic precedents to suggest a general conflation between mazurkas and varsovianas in the 1840s. I then demonstrate that the ‘La Varsoviana’ melody composed by Francisco Alonso, which forms the basis of all ‘Varsoviana’ variants today, intended to present a Spanish musical theme. As this dance and music is popularly considered to be Polish in either origin or signification this finding significantly reframes the dance’s perceived Polishness, in the process highlighting the pitfalls of searching for original meaning or origin in the name of a dance or music piece alone.
Mike Boursnell ‘The Outlandish Knight’: A Test Case for the Use of Phylogenetic Analysis in Folk Songs
The evolutionary mechanisms that drive variation among living organisms have many close parallels to those which drive variation among folk songs. There are similarities between the process of DNA mutation, which leads to new animal species, and the so-called ‘traditional process’ which is postulated to lead to new variants of songs. The computer tools that are used to construct family trees of organisms using their DNA sequences are known as ‘phylogenetic software’. In this paper I describe the use of these tools to look at the relationships between different versions of a single folk song – in this case Child 4, ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight’ or ‘The Outlandish Knight’. The results are compared with those produced in Holger Olof Nygard’s book ‘The Ballad of Heer Halewijn – Its Forms and Variations in Western Europe’ (1958), which is an incredibly detailed study of many European versions of this folk song. The study shows that convincing family trees can be constructed which are very similar to those produced by traditional scholarship.
George Frampton Lucky Lukey’s Northsea: Vernacular Song in the Pre-War Cullercoats Fishing Community
Cullercoats is a village halfway between the resorts of Whitley Bay and Tynemouth on the north-east coast of England. Its main industry once was fishing, with men going out in their cobles from its harbour, while their wives hawked the produce inland at North Shields. Until the invention of the phonograph and onset of the wireless in the 1920s, music was learned elsewhere and reproduced in the home, at work, chapel, or church. This article draws on hitherto unexplored manuscript and print sources to chart the repertoire of vernacular song and the singing practices among this community in the period, in particular up to the end of the First World War, before the age of the wireless and phonograph.
Notes
‘The Quaker’s Wife’: A Note on a Rediscovered Country Dance Sean Goddard
Reviews - Books
Cecil Sharp and the Quest for Folk Song and Dance (Sutcliffe) Michael Heaney
‘Jinny the Witch’ and Other Song Folk (Roud and Atkinson, eds) Michael Pickering
Mary Neal and the Suffragettes Who Saved Morris Dancing (Atherton) Sue Swift
Handmade Music: Suffolk Voices from the John Howson Collection (Wisdom) Paul Cowdell
Cheap Print and Street Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (Atkinson and Roud, eds) Catherine Ann Cullen
Amazing Grace: A Cultural History of the Beloved Hymn (Walvin) Frances Wilkins
Gun Sireadh, Gun Iarraidh: The Tolmie Collection (Campbell and Hamill, eds) Karen McAulay
A Secret Stream, Volume 2: Folk Songs Collected from the Gypsy and Travelling Community (Dow, Gardham, and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne) Andy Turner Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Late Medieval England (Rastall, with Taylor) Steve Roud
Performing Folk Songs: Affect, Landscape and Repertoire (Bennett) Nancy Kerr Elliott
Vaughan Williams and Folk: 150th Anniversary Essays (Roud and Atkinson, eds) Paul Burgess
Billy Waters Is Dancing; or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Shannon) John Baxter
The Nordic Minuet: Royal Fashion and Peasant Tradition (Hoppu, Bakka, and Fiskvik, eds) Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe
No Better Boy: Listening to Paddy Canny (O’Shea) Matt Cranitch
An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock Music (Thompson) Brian Peters
Jock Duncan: The Man and His Songs (Shepheard, ed.) Ian Russell
Jock Duncan: From Aikey Brae to Ythanside Ian Russell
Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada (Sparling) Julia C. Bishop
Reviews - Films
A Small Quiet English Town: Sidmouth Folk Festival Documentary (Baybutt, director) Phil Long
King for a Day (Santi, director) Peter Harrop
Frontline Folklore: Twenty Folk Customs of the British Isles (Edge, director) Peter Harrop
Reviews - Online resources
100 Ballads website David Atkinson
Obituary
John Foreman Mike Butler
Cover illustration: Fanny Cerrito and Mlle Camille dancing ‘Varsovienne’ (lithograph, J. Brandard, 1842). Courtesy of the Royal Ballet School Special Collections.
Editor: David Atkinson
Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe: Varsoviana audio files
FIGURE 1
‘The Versevianna: Father Halpin’s Top Coat’, from Francis Roche (ed.), Collection of Irish Airs, Marches and Dance Tunes, vol. 3 (Dublin: Piggott & Co., 1927), p.49 (tune 150).
FIGURE 4
Francisco Alonzo, La Varsoviana (Paris: de Bauve, 1852) bars 10–37. [Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ark:/12148/cb428131339].
FIGURE 6
Isidore Dannström, Mazurkas Favourites: No. 2 La Varsovienne, La Suédoise (Paris: au Ménestral, 1844) [Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ark:/12148/bpt6k880029n], bars 9–16.
FIGURE 7
Louis Antoine Jullien, The Varsovien Mazurka annd Celarius Waltz (1844), bars 9–20. 1844), [Baltimore, Goucher College Library, Special Collections Bond 0195]
cdm16235.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16235coll17/id/129/rec/1
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