Asian Artpainting of a Man Chasing His Hat on a Dock in a Wind Storm
Like all good stories, folk music is largely about three things: sex, death and politics. There might be a lot of carousing along the style, and there may be 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.
So, as we head towards this yr'south Radio 2 Folk Awards, here are x examples of songs that go beyond the bounds of homo decency (and are all the better for it):
Warning: contains some adult themes.
1. Died for Honey
Matters of the heart have a habit of turning ruddy, raw and encarmine in traditional songs, and then information technology goes with Died for Dearest, also known equally A Sailor's Life, Sugariness William, and Willie the Assuming Sailor Boy (and performed past everyone from Fairport Convention to The Watersons). It's a tale of a woman pining for her true dearest who has fix out to sea and not returned. Desperate to find him, she sets out to sea herself and meets the Queen'due south send. She asks if they take seen William, and after some word over the cut and colour of his coat and pilus, they tell her he has drowned.
Some versions of the song end hither, simply Died for Dear (as performed here past Martin and Eliza Carthy) continues, with a verse in which her father enters her chamber to detect her "hanging by a rope", with a notation attached to her breast asking him to bury her with marble stones at her head and anxiety, with a snowfall-white dove in the middle, "only to let the earth know that I died for dear."
two. The Savage Mother
This queasy tale of infanticide has been sung by everyone 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 two new-born children with a knife. But the blade becomes unwashable - the more she wipes it, the "more than red" information technology grows. She and so meets ii babies in the entrance to a church, and tells them she'd care for them wonderfully if they were hers. They turn out to exist the ghosts of her children, who tell her that she'due south bound for hell.
three. The Unquiet Grave
Also known as Ane True Love and Cold Blows the Wind (as performed above past Bellowhead), this is a vocal of mourning that takes a dark turn into gothic nihilism. A woman throws herself on the grave of her true love, drastic for one concluding kiss to relieve her grief. Her passion is such that, subsequently a year-long graveside vigil, her man rises up to speak to her, then that he can truly residuum in peace. She begs for a buss, but he warns her that his lips are "common cold as the clay" and that a kiss from him would finish her life likewise.
In the Shirley Collins version, he then explains that their love, while it was in one case "the fairest flower that east'er was seen / Has withered to the stalk", going on to add: "The stalk is withered dry, truthful beloved / So must our hearts decay / Then residue yourself content, my dear / Till God calls you away". Which is the kind of stark message from the hereafter that you never really got in Ghost.
4. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
This business relationship of the death of a black hotel worker is drawn from gimmicky history - Bob Dylan wrote it almost every bit before long as the court case had ended - and yet information technology has a theme that runs as far back through folk music history equally the texts allow u.s.a. to see. It's about people in the higher echelons of society abusing those who are lower down and appearing to go abroad with it. In this case, it'due south 24-year-old tobacco plantation owner William Zantzinger, who rapped Hattie Carroll with his cane for not serving his drink fast enough. She collapsed and died of heart failure, and he received a six-month jail judgement.
In this documentary, made by Howard Sounes, author of Downwardly the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, we find out more nigh the example from start hand witnesses, and even hear from Zantzinger himself, who turns out non to exist 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 carnal men, from the direct O Soldier Won't You Ally Me to the poetic Let No Homo Steal Your Thyme. Cold Haily Rainy Night (or Cold Blow and a Rainy Nighttime, Let Me In This Ae Nicht and even The Laird o' Windy Wa's) has retained its potency as a stark contrast between what people will say to become what they desire, and how they will comport one time they become it.
The song - equally 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 go warm ("oh my hat is frozen to my head, my anxiety are like 2 lumps of lead"), and despite the take a chance of discovery, she eventually lets him in and one affair leads to another. She proposes marriage, but he'due south not interested, puts his lid back on and heads out into the tempest, leaving her reputation in tatters.
six. The Knoxville Girl
Also known equally Hanged I Shall Be, The Oxford Tragedy, The Oxford Girl, The Wexford Girl, The Butcher Boy and many others, this vocal - 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 adult female he likes the look of, so he takes her to a remote location to pitch woo, but kills her instead. And then the guilt starts.
In The Knoxville Girl, sung by, among others, The Lemonheads, Elvis Costello and Nick Cave (who knows a matter or two virtually murder ballads), the vocalist hits the object of his affections with a stick, many times, although before variants have her stabbed with a knife, and and so drowned for practiced measure. Each version tends to end in a similar way, with the singer realising he's jump for prison, and maybe the gallows, and besides about certainly for eternal damnation.
7. Matty Groves
Settle downwardly, this is what they call a page-turner. Matty Groves (as sung hither by Ben Nicholls) is the story of a young human being who catches the eye of the local lord'south wife - in Sandy Denny's version of the vocal with Fairport Convention, he's Lord Donald, but the names and song titles alter often. Matty at first refuses her advances, then capitulates, only one of Lord Donald's servants has told his chief.
Outraged, the Lord finds the couple in bed, and insists that Matty fight. Matty, who is naked, strikes the get-go blow, merely is immediately killed, and Lord Donald then asks his wife which of the two she prefers. She says expressionless Matty, then Lord Donald kills her too, and buries the two lovers in the same grave, with her on top, because she's posher. See? Sex, death and politics.
eight. Oh Death
Also known as Conversations with Death, this vocal comes from the Appalachian mountains, wellspring of country music. Written largely by Lloyd Chandler, there are two key versions (amid many popular covers), one in the late 1920s past banjo player Dock Boggs, and the a capella version in 2000 past bluegrass fable Ralph Stanley, for the moving-picture show O Brother, Where Fine art Thou?
Information technology's the song of a desperate, 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 to take the soul / Leave the body and exit it common cold / To describe upwardly the flesh off of the frame / Dirt and worm both take a merits."
9. Hanging on the One-time Barbed Wire
Every bit Joan Bakewell explains in this study, the 1960s musical Oh! What A Lovely State of war retold the history of the First World War using popular songs of the time as a darkly comic manner of satirically retelling the story of the conflict. Only this vocal from the 1918 trenches didn't make the cut, probably because information technology portrays the hierarchy of army life in quite a brutal low-cal. Each poesy offers a take a chance to find where representatives of a particular rank might be found - from sergeant down to individual - with the officers described as being variously "lying on the canteen floor" to "miles and miles backside the line". Past contrast, the poor privates (or battalion, depending on the version of the vocal) can be found "hanging on the quondam barbed wire".
The song was popular with the soldiers (but not their commanding officers) during the latter days of the war, and was recreated by Chumbawamba for their a capella drove of insurrectionary erstwhile folk tunes, English Rebel Songs 1381–1984.
10. On Morecambe Bay
As we've seen, folk music works uncommonly well at putting across the personal side of a story with political ramifications, and this is merely as truthful when information technology's sung about a contempo event. In 2004, at least 21 illegally employed Chinese migrant workers died while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay, when they were caught past the incoming tide. The human side of this preventable tragedy was captured in the vocal On Morecambe Bay, past Kevin Littlewood, which has been memorably covered by Christy Moore, thank you to the intervention of Mike Harding (every bit Christy reveals in this interview with Cerys Matthews).
From the first verse, he finds himself wishing he could accept stepped forward to warn them, the fashion "our mothers" warned local children, that yous can't outrun the tide, then introduces this poetic refrain: "For the tide is The Devil, it will run yous out of breath / Race you to the seashore, chase you to your expiry / The tide is the very Devil and the Devil has its day / On the solitary crinkle banks of Morecambe Bay."
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Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/8beeaac5-064c-4406-9e85-d42cebf9a53b
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