RE: What is a folk song?

[music <music...>]

Sylvia Schildt writes:

> I mean a folk song is one whose authorship is lost to time and has many
> versions.  

These are, certainly, conventional distinctions.  But, fwiw, I and many other
students, historians, etc., of folk music don't accept them.

I believe it was Francis B. Gummere who made the distinction between "the
definition by destination and the definition by origins."  

>From the liner notes of, I believe, one of my historical folk music records 
(I'm embarrassed to have photocopied the following without a note of what
record it came from, and am not going to determine it now):

"A more fruitful conception of folk music is obtained if one casts aside the
criterion of origins and concentrates on possession; it doesn't matter where
a particular song or tune originated; what does matter is what has become 
of it....if [a] piece of music has become part of the collective lore of the
community, then it has become folk music."

This definition, I think, far more accurately suits our intuitive notion of what
is folk music.  (I believe in a Potter Stewart definition of folk music:  We 
know
it when we hear it).  "The Hammer Song" ("If I Had a Hammer") is a folk song,
though we know not only who its composers were but exactly where and when
they wrote it.  "This Land Is Your Land" is a folk song.  (Ditto.)  Rod 
MacDonald's
"Sailor's Prayer" and Si Kahn's "Aragon Mill" have both been "mistaken" for
"folk" songs by Sylvia's traditional definition -- but that's an invariable 
indication
that they *are* -- they have become -- folk songs.

In Jewish music, "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen" is a folk song, and so is "Oyfn 
Pripitchek" --
which, apparently, was being taken as a "folk song" -- i.e., it had "lost its 
composer"
and was assumed to be "traditional" -- within weeks of its composition.

A second part of Sylvia's distinction:

> I think of art songs as someone's poetry set to music. 

likewise, perhaps, raises more questions than it answers.  For one thing, some 
songs 
fitting this definition would surely be considered folk songs -- like John 
Jacob Niles',
perhaps?!  And is "Mr. Tambourine Man" (set to music, obviously, by the writer) 
an
art song, a folk song, or neither?  What about other Dylan songs, and Joni 
Mitchell's
songs, and so many others?

Finally, Sylvia or someone else noted that folk songs tend to be (communally) 
singable.
That is certainly very often so, and is true of many songs that we would 
consider to be
folk songs; I think it's a reasonable component of a guide to the turf of what 
(often) 
constitutes a folk song.  But it still leaves much of the creative product of 
today's singer-
songwriters sort-of unclassifiable.

-- Robert Cohen

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