We must also mention that great class of songs which are not strictly folk-songs at all, but deserve to rank as folk-songs by every title except the technical one. They are those songs written by conscious composers, published and sold, but intended for wide circulation and great popularity—those, in short, which by their simplicity and genuineness evoke a human response similar to that evoked by true folk-songs. Such are the immortal songs of Stephen Foster in America—‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ ‘Old Black Joe,’ and the rest. Such is ‘Annie Laurie,’ one of the most beautiful of melodies. And such are the German songs of Silcher—Die Lorelei, Scheiden, and many others. Nearly all these composers have been without aptitude in the larger musical forms—often persons of little education and culture. Very few great composers have succeeded in thus writing folk-songs. Weber, of all of them, is the nearest to the folk-spirit, and the slow movement of Agathe’s aria, Leise, leise, from Der Freischütz, is now a permanent folk-song with the best of them. Schubert’s Lindenbaum and Heidenröslein have the same quality. Mendelssohn is a folk-composer by virtue of his song Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath. But in general it has seemed next to impossible for a conscious and highly trained composer to catch the spirit of the folk in simplest terms.
The most available folk-music for the average student is that which is freely arranged and edited by a man whose name is a guarantee of honest and musicianly work—such a man as Weckerlin, collector and editor of French songs from the earliest to the most recent; or Cecil Sharp, collector of forgotten songs in Somersetshire, England. Such an editor may keep the songs intact or may vary them, may adopt some one else’s accompaniment or write one of his own, but he will always do it intelligently, altering only what it is reasonably necessary to alter, and keeping always true to the spirit, if not to the letter, of the original.
It should be borne in mind that the songs to be described in the following pages are, many of them, sung quite spontaneously and naturally to-day by the peasants and unsophisticated people of the various countries. The writer, while crossing the ocean, once listened for hours to the Dutch steerage passengers amusing themselves with songs and dances. And he recognized among the songs the famous ‘William of Nassau,’ probably centuries old. Thus simple people in European countries are constantly singing enduring masterpieces of music along with much, of course, that is ephemeral.
In the very brief survey which we shall make of folk-songs as the student finds them to his hand to-day we shall be able to do no more than suggest the national characteristics of each group. Anything like a list of the fine songs of each nation, or an adequate appreciation of its popular music, would be impossible in less than a volume. Likewise, all the interesting questions of racial characteristics as affecting art, of technical development and international interchange, of æsthetic theory and melodic analysis, must be left quite to one side until there shall be written the adequate book on folk-music which as yet does not exist in the English language. The present chapter attempts only to suggest the contrasting characteristics of the different folk-song traditions and the amazing extent of the treasure which has until so recently remained for the most part unknown, or known only to be snubbed.
II
England, Scotland, and Ireland, now grouped together as the tiniest part only, geographically speaking, of the British Empire, were in early times as distinct and as antagonistic, nationally, as Germany and France are to-day. The lack of means of communication and social organization made it possible for very different social and artistic traditions to flourish independently within a few miles of each other. Thus there grew up in these countries highly distinct musical traditions which have preserved their individuality even through these days of printing presses and phonographs. Each of these musical traditions—the English, the Scotch, and the Irish—had its roots in the earliest times of which we have any record. And it is evident that the musical life of these countries was vigorous in the extreme. The beauty and individuality of the Scotch and Irish songs are familiar, but it has been accepted as axiomatic until recently that England was an unmusical nation—that she had neither the geniuses to create nor the people to appreciate the finest and sincerest musical beauty. Especially it was supposed that she had no truly creative folk-song. Certainly it is true that England for centuries stifled her folk-song, keeping it among the peasant classes, dumb and suppressed, where Germany coaxed hers upward to illumine and inspire the whole nation to great deeds. Recent investigators, notably Mr. Cecil Sharp, have unearthed in Somersetshire and elsewhere a great wealth of popular songs, most of them never before set on paper, but many of them showing great antiquity and distinctive beauty. This folk-art existed for centuries among the almost unlettered classes without the nation as a whole being aware of the fact. Now that the songs have been noted down and published it can never again be said that England, in the roots of her, is unmusical or uncreative in popular song. These songs, which are all the more charming for never having felt the influence of learned music, are almost as peculiar and inimitable as those of Scotland or Russia. Those of ancient origin—roughly speaking, from Elizabeth’s time or previous—are modal in style. But the modes are not the usual ones of the melodic minor or its most familiar variation, the Doric. They are the queerest things imaginable to modern ears, strange scales with raised sixths and lowered sevenths, melting from minor into major and back again. The feeling for the tonic is often very vague, the chief note of the scale being sometimes the second or the fourth or the fifth. These unquestionable evidences of antiquity lend a strange charm to the melodies. And the charm is one that is distinct from that of every other national folk-music.
The earliest of the English songs, barring a few questionable specimens, probably date from the time of Henry VIII (1491-1547), who was himself an accomplished musician and composer of several excellent songs. Among these are the Boar’s Head Carol, antedating 1521, still sung at Christmas gatherings; and the traditional tune for Shakespeare’s lyric, ‘Oh, Mistress Mine.’ Some of the simple airs to which the old Robin Hood ballads were sung also date from this period. The traditional air for the Chevy Chase ballads dates from the time of Charles I. But from this time on what passed in England for folk-songs were usually nothing but popular songs of the moment, published like any others and sung widely among the middle classes. These songs will be treated in another chapter. For our purpose here we must now skip more than three centuries and come down to the time when the interest in folk-song and folk-dancing began to revive in England. For the recent crop of folk-songs we are indebted to the labors of investigators like Mr. Sharp, patient, painstaking, sympathetic, and admirably equipped in point of musical technique. These men combine the qualities of the artist and the scientist. They have passed quite beyond the attitude of the eighteenth century collectors of folk-poetry—such distinguished men as Bishop Percy and Sir Walter Scott—who did their work out of personal enthusiasm but felt obliged to apologize for the poems they found. (Herder, who worked in Germany about the same time, was the one man who took the modern attitude, which is equally scholarly, scientific, and artistic.) The modern investigators feel their obligations to preserve the songs exactly as they come from the lips of the people. When they publish collections of these songs for popular use they supply accompaniments which are sometimes sophisticated and, in Mr. Sharp’s case, scholarly and delightful. But they seek always to preserve the letter and the spirit of the melodies in their arrangements. Such singers as the Misses Fuller, and Yvette Gilbert and her pupil Miss Loraine Wyman have spread the knowledge of the folk-songs of England and France and have demonstrated the great beauty of them to thousands who had never suspected it.
The English songs, fine as they are from a technical standpoint, have no very great emotional range. A few, like the famous ‘Willow’ song, strike a deep note of sorrow, but by far the greater portion are lively songs of the open-air or of festal gatherings. They reveal a vigorous sense of touch, a whole-hearted joy in the primitive feelings of the human body, in the invigorating English out-of-doors. They are clear-cut and literal—recalling the type of life and feeling which we associate with ‘the roast beef of old England.’ Their naïveté is that of an exuberant joy in the commonplace joys of life. We may mention such songs as ‘The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies, O!’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ for their inspiriting physical vigor. Such songs as ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ (old tune), the Wassail song from Sussex, or the Sheep-shearing Song from Somerset, are worthy of much study as fine examples of the old English use of modal scales.
The Scotch songs, of all true folk-songs the world over, have for many decades been the most familiar. No nation, except perhaps Russia, has been more vigorously creative in its folk-music than Scotland. Many excellent judges regard the Scotch folk-music as the finest in the world. It is probably quite as ancient as any. It entered into the lives of the Scotch people from the earliest times, when the Highland bards sang their praises to little tribal chieftains or narrated in rude verse the battles between one clan and another. There is a very old harper’s tune in existence, probably much modified in the course of the centuries but still eloquent of antiquity, which suggests the majesty of the days gone by. (It may be found under its modern title, ‘Harp of the Highlands.’) A large proportion of these tunes have lost their original words and taken on new ones. Robert Burns stimulated the process by writing words of his own (among them some of the greatest of his poems) for well-known melodies. The loss of the old texts, which were often crude or indecent, is, on the whole, of little moment from the artistic standpoint, especially since Burns, one of the finest folk-spirits of all ages, wrote words which fit the mouths of the people like their own. Perhaps, too, his words, as in the case of ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ helped to keep the old tunes alive and popular. Burns is one of the rare instances of a conscious artist who has been able to meddle with folk-art without making himself ridiculous.
A large number of the Scotch songs are written in the pentatonic or five-note scale—our ordinary major with the fourth and seventh omitted. Whether this was due to some early form of the Scotch bagpipe or to the genius of the people is still an open question.[8] But it is certain that the Scotch have given an individual flavor to their songs by means of this scale without betraying the least embarrassment over the absence of the two notes. Who imagines, for instance, until it is pointed out, that the magnificent ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is wholly in the pentatonic? The pentatonic feeling runs through nearly all the Scotch songs and in a large proportion of them exists almost in full purity. The occasional use of the fourth and seventh in the tunes of ‘Scots Wha Hae’ or ‘The Campbells Are Coming’ is unessential and probably a recent modification.