Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From English Folk Songs

This has to be the best blog on the net.

If the lady of the mannor tells you it’s okay to come home and sleep with her since her husband it out in the far feilds and won’t know, don’t believe her.

These and many other bits of timely advice (“If you’re in bed, and are threatened by an armed and angry man who says he can’t kill you while you’re naked, do not get up and get dressed”) have been much discussed in the comment thread following the original post.

I admire Jim’s use of gruesome traditional ballads to teach prudence and morality. I’ve been saying for years that if you want proof that “Just Say No” doesn’t work, you need look no further than trad ballads, whose dramatis personae will have been repeatedly warned (with accompanying threats of Dire Consequences) to not dally in haylofts with attractive young men, stay away from those New York Girls who haunt the waterfront, and don’t believe promises made by grenadiers whose units are moving out tomorrow. Clearly, if “Just Say No” warnings were sufficient, none of these ballads would exist.

Much more educational, then, to contemplate the universe of traditional ballads, where drinking leads to vulnerability, sex invariably has consequences, protestations of undying love don’t necessarily survive the discovery of pregnancy, promises not witnessed by third parties are unenforceable, and personable strangers who want you to come with them to some lonely spot do not have your best interests at heart.

the main message of Welsh folk songs is that whatever you do, you’re going to die and it’s the Saxons’ fault.

And don’t ever visit boys at night if you’re a girl– or as Robbie put it, “I read ye recht, gaen ne’er at necht”.

I think that the message of American folk songs is that if you’re fundamentally good at cards, don’t expect your armed opponents to be good losers.

If you are physically unable to get pregnant due to being male, the girl you had sex with will get pregnant. No good will come of it. You’ll either kill her, or she’ll kill herself, or her husband/brother/father/uncle/cousin will kill you both. In any case her Doleful Ghost will make sure everyone finds out. You will either get hanged, kill yourself, or be carried off bodily by Satan. Your last words will begin “Come all ye.”

Why is it you never get good advice until it’s too late?

I kinda prefer Hardy’s take on all this in “The Ruined Maid.” May have been Victorian, but I suspect he knew more of the ballads and what was behind than a whole pride of blog posters.

Don’t kill yourself, even if a lot of other people kill themselves.

There’s a danish/norwegian folk song called “Adolf var av stand velboren” (“Adolf was from a good family”). My friends who have studied folkloristics assure me that it’s not ironic.

In the first verse, Adolf is rejected by Nora, so he throws himself from a big tower in Copenhagen. In the next verse, Nora hears the news, and promptly commits suicide by drinking “a schaps of vitriol” or sulphuric acid, as it is commonly known. Next verse, the father kills himself – the mother was already dead, we hear.

In a couple of verses, random strangers on the street hear the awful story and start killing themselves, too.

It’s the most hilarious folk song I’ve heard. To think that a century ago, they probably cried.

(s/verse/stanza/g if you want to be correct about it)

Whiskey is better than women, at least in Irish folk songs.

Also, improving your elocution will break your lover’s heart.

Oh yes. If you glitter as you walk, do not, I repeat, do not go home if you keep a loaded gun there.

And now…

Everything I know I learned from Celtic Folktales…

http://wordgravity.blogspot.com/2005/09/what-ive-learned-from-celtic-folktales.html