Indeed. Some songs which were once considered to be 'folk' songs (whatever 'folk' song actually is/was) turn out, with the benefit of modern scholarship, to be composed works which became popular in the theatre etc and later set to different texts. Things like 'Auld lang syne' with words by Burns but with the tune once thought to be of 'folk' origins. In fact the tune was composed by William Shield for his hit Rosina....... And not only on the 'folk' scene, I've even seen Arne's Shakespeare settings listed as English folk tunes in a concert programme............
Like you, I've not studied Sharpe's collections in depth but it seemed to me that they may contain many country dance tunes than those which started life as songs: Playford and other similar collections come to mind. Nevertheless, there are clearly quite a few tunes (some not captured by Sharpe) which seem to have remained popular for a considerable period of time and certainly much more that two or three generations - with some we even know the copmposer. I note that the trend is now to call such widely disseminated popular songs not 'Folk songs' but 'English (or Scottish, Irish, Welsh) National songs' which I think describes many much better. And so includes: Greensleeves, When the King enjoys his own again, The Vicar of Bray, The roast beef of Old England, Nancy Dawson, Sally in our Alley (Carey), The Jovial Broom man, Saint turned sinners, Tom Bowling (Dibdin), Home sweet home (Bishop) etc, etc... MH --- On Fri, 10/8/12, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: From: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [LUTE] Re: Survival of folk music from 1400-1650. To: [email protected] Cc: "Herbert Ward" <[email protected]>, "Alain Veylit" <[email protected]>, [email protected] Date: Friday, 10 August, 2012, 11:22 I'd be more circumspect about the proportion, and the integrity, of folk material surviving from the renaissance until the age of the collectors, at least as far as the British tradition is concerned. No doubt there are some songs which survived that time, but in probably no case would it be very close to its original tune and words, and so identifying them from style etc would be problematic. Aside from Greensleeves, which is arguably a special case, and which is widespread in the written literature, I have come across no material known from the lute/keyboard arrangement ballad setting era which appears in the Child/Sharp material - not that I've made a special study of this. Even with literary references, eg Shakespeare one is always plagued by the problem of different tunes and lyrics going by different names at different times. I would say that certainly as far as the overwhelming majority of material is concerned, most items in the folk tradition tended to have a lifespan of about three generations before either being forgotten or changed out of all recognition by the 'folk process' (eg gradual change). If there are any notable contradictions to that view I'd be very interested to see the evidence. Stephen --- Original message --- Subject: [LUTE] Re: Survival of folk music from 1400-1650. From: <[1][email protected]> To: Herbert Ward <[2][email protected]>, Alain Veylit <[3][email protected]> Cc: <[4][email protected]> Date: Friday, 10/08/2012 4:30 AM Thanks Herbert for this question, and thanks Alain for this information. I'd like to add that a lot of true folk music, at least in the English and French languages, IS preserved. It was transmitted via oral tradition and recorded and transcribed by collectors in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. In English, Francis Child and Cecil Sharp saved much valuable material from oblivion. In French Canada, Marius Barbeau, E. Z. Massicote and others did the same. Many of these songs originated with jongleurs and often date back to the early Renaissance and Medieval times. Although it is all but gone now, the oral tradition was still very much alive in rural areas into the 20th century, and many source singers were recorded by Barbeau, Sharp and others as early as 1916 on Edison cylinders. I'll be happy to share some bibliographies if anybody is interested. Tom Herbert, If you mean popular music rather than 'folk' (which I believe is a 1960s concept, so not yet relevant in the 1560s), Thomas Ravenscroft ([1][5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ravenscroft) made his fame collecting and publishing it with the express aim to preserve it from oblivion. Another very important source for the 16th century are the single sheet ballads -- a lot (1000s of those) have survived and most are available in facsimile formats. The University of Santa Barbara is hosting a project to make those ballads more digitally available (see [2][6]http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/). Very few of those single sheets have printed music but they usually carry a mention of the tune they should be sung to, so they give a good idea of what tunes were popular: most of those exist in one or several solo lute version of some kind - Packington's pound being an example among dozens. I mention the Robert ap Huw manuscript as an effort to preserve very early harp music at [3][7]http://musickshandmade.com/lute/collections/view/50 . Attaingnant's publications for the lute in France covered the type of material that we might identify today as 'folk': popular and even regional. I think it even preserves the tunes used by tradesmen to get attention and sell their goods in the streets, "les cris de Paris". Many folk tunes have their origin in good old 'classical' music, i.e. compositions by highly educated and professionally trained musicians. Gabriel Bataille's publications of the 'Airs de cour' for instance would have provided much material for provincial folks to emulate. In the 17th and 18th century in England, much if not all of the theater songs were published and popularized. You might find it interesting to compare those 2 versions of the same French popular tune on YouTube: [4][8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tXiY2A8nAM and [5][9]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJZu_Bz6Yo&feature=related. I heard that the beautiful italian tune "Vestiva i colli" is still sung in some areas of Italy as a favorite folk tune making it one of the longest lasting melody in Europe - whether Palestrina actually composed the melody or arranged it from a popular source. My 2 cents on this rather complex and fascinating subject, Alain On 08/08/2012 08:40 AM, Herbert Ward wrote: I've always assumed that little of the folk music from 1400-1650 has survived, except for that preserved as lute arrangements (Go From My Window, Fortune My Foe, etc.), because of the low literacy and the high cost of paper. Is this accurate? To get on or off this list see list information at [6][10]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html Tom Draughon Heartistry Music [7][11]http://www.heartistrymusic.com/artists/tom.html 714 9th Avenue West Ashland, WI 54806 715-682-9362 -- References 1. [12]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ravenscroft 2. [13]http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ 3. [14]http://musickshandmade.com/lute/collections/view/50 4. [15]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tXiY2A8nAM 5. [16]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJZu_Bz6Yo&feature=related. 6. [17]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html 7. [18]http://www.heartistrymusic.com/artists/tom.html -- References 1. http://us.mc817.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected] 2. http://us.mc817.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected] 3. http://us.mc817.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected] 4. http://us.mc817.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected] 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ravenscroft 6. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ 7. http://musickshandmade.com/lute/collections/view/50 8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tXiY2A8nAM 9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJZu_Bz6Yo&feature=related 10. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html 11. http://www.heartistrymusic.com/artists/tom.html 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ravenscroft 13. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ 14. http://musickshandmade.com/lute/collections/view/50 15. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tXiY2A8nAM 16. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJZu_Bz6Yo&feature=related 17. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html 18. http://www.heartistrymusic.com/artists/tom.html
