No Talk That God Is Dead

Some hundred years ago an effete corps of impudent academic snobs in both Cambridges ordained ex cathedra that folksong as a scholarly province was to be literary archaeology. In our culture the only permissible midden straddled the border between England and Scotland, but this was not to be worked except from a temporal and topographical distance, partly because the area was thought to harbor regional savages, some of whom were still suspected of painting their behinds blue. The scholar collected his material by writing letters from Harvard to his British congeners who, on brass-rubbing expeditions to the periphery of aboriginal country, might have spoken with old, docile and excaudate native females. These creatures, if one stimulated their microus brains with nerve-tightener, could remember Noah’s Flood and sing about it. However, their repertoire canonically was restricted to ballads about aristocratic manslaughter and noble bawdry, with an occasional maudlin narrative about brave Scottish mariners like Sir Patrick Spens and other linear forebears of the Pueblo’s officers whose bloodshot ee welled with tears of terror when they were ordered to take their ships out when it was raining. The singers were for genetic reasons held to be quite incapable of composing them, so indubitable theory was left to prove that folksongs had their origin under cabbage leaves.

Meanwhile Appalachia and other American folk enclaves rang with songs ignored by the few scholars who knew they existed. In an age when syphilis was known to be communicated by pipe smoking one could not reasonably expect decent folklorists to have anything to do with songs like “The Unfortunate Rake,” an eighteenth-century street song about a young soldier dying of a social disease. Modern ethnomusicologists perversely find the Rake to be more significant than the wet Sir Patrick Spens. Brought to this country (by the Irish, no doubt), the song changed sex in Appalachia like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and became “The Bad Girl’s Lament.” Among the Southern Negroes it is still “St. James’ Infirmary.” Out West among the Dickensian sentimentalists of the cow industry it is “Streets of Laredo.” As far off as Australia the Rake appears joined to another eighteenth-century street song, “The Tarpaulin Jacket,” to produce an affinal descendant, “The Dying Stockman.” There is even an Irish-Negro variant of the Rake in the Virgin Islands, which is a strange place to find him in view of his ailment’s nature.

JG

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John Greenway

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Some hundred years ago an effete corps of impudent academic snobs in both Cambridges ordained ex cathedra that folksong as a scholarly province was to be literary archaeology. In our culture the only permissible midden straddled the border between England and Scotland, but this was not to be worked except from a temporal and topographical distance, partly because the area was thought to harbor regional savages, some of whom were still suspected of painting their behinds blue. The scholar collected his material by writing letters from Harvard to his British congeners who, on brass-rubbing expeditions to the periphery of aboriginal country, might have spoken with old, docile and excaudate native females. These creatures, if one stimulated their microus brains with nerve-tightener, could remember Noah’s Flood and sing about it. However, their repertoire canonically was restricted to ballads about aristocratic manslaughter and noble bawdry, with an occasional maudlin narrative about brave Scottish mariners like Sir Patrick Spens and other linear forebears of the Pueblo’s officers whose bloodshot ee welled with tears of terror when they were ordered to take their ships out when it was raining. The singers were for genetic reasons held to be quite incapable of composing them, so indubitable theory was left to prove that folksongs had their origin under cabbage leaves.

Meanwhile Appalachia and other American folk enclaves rang with songs ignored by the few scholars who knew they existed. In an age when syphilis was known to be communicated by pipe smoking one could not reasonably expect decent folklorists to have anything to do with songs like “The Unfortunate Rake,” an eighteenth-century street song about a young soldier dying of a social disease. Modern ethnomusicologists perversely find the Rake to be more significant than the wet Sir Patrick Spens. Brought to this country (by the Irish, no doubt), the song changed sex in Appalachia like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and became “The Bad Girl’s Lament.” Among the Southern Negroes it is still “St. James’ Infirmary.” Out West among the Dickensian sentimentalists of the cow industry it is “Streets of Laredo.” As far off as Australia the Rake appears joined to another eighteenth-century street song, “The Tarpaulin Jacket,” to produce an affinal descendant, “The Dying Stockman.” There is even an Irish-Negro variant of the Rake in the Virgin Islands, which is a strange place to find him in view of his ailment’s nature.