Folk music

Tonight I heard Que nadie sepa me sufrir in a version on the requinto, a small classical guitar in a higher tone where detailed accompaniment can be heard clearly. It's played by the Colombian Diego Barrera, a man of prodigious talent. The song was actually written by Ángel Cabral, with lyrics by Enrique Dizeo, both Argentinian although it was conceived as a vals criollo, a folk genre connected with Peru.  It is a much loved song in the Americas.  Famous versions have been done by the Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo, Alberto Castillo and the Spanish / Chilean Maria Dolores Pradera. 

In the milongas of course we know it best in the De Angelis version but I think in the Spanish speaking world the other versions are better known, probably in the order in which I have presented them.  Jaramillo interpreted many genres, including Rondando tu esquina which again is likely better known than the Pugliese/ Chanel and D'Agostino/ Vargas versions more familiar to tango dancers, even though the piece and the lyrics were again written by Argentinians (Charlo / Cadícamo).

I heard the stalker is now teaching tango, after little more than a year's experience with someone equally unsuited.  "They don't just want to be near you, they want to be you"  were prophetic words said to me, indeed.  The way things have played out is sad for the development of new dancers in that city but irrelevant to me, except in that it rules out any desire to dance there until that situation resolves. Musically and dance wise the milonga scene in the bigger cities has long not been interesting enough to warrant the time and expense of the travel often to go there unless in combination with some other activity.  How is this related to folk music?

If obliged to dance much less, why give up exploring music altogether? Folk music from the Americas was the area of folk I knew a little of.  Perhaps if I visited the local folk scene - conveniently a couple of blocks from my house - I would meet someone who knew the folk songs I knew. In a city of 50,000 in central Scotland in a large region with only another 50,000 this, unsurprisingly, has proved fruitless but I have learned some British and Irish folk music meanwhile.  

The genre in Scotland still survives quite well.  A caller at a recent ceilidh told me in the interval that there are even "bothy ballad" competitions.  These were, and maybe still are songs sung at farms at the time my mother grew up in the forties, but they are peculiar to her area of Scotland and are sung in doric, a dialect of Scots spoken in the north east of Scotland.

As a child I heard a man called old Harry  - who would have been about ninety in the 1970s - talk at his house in my grandmother's village.  He lived opposite the end of Farquharson Street in Laurencekirk and I had asked my grandmother to take me to hear him talk.  I recall quite a number of people in his living room.  But what I do certainly remember is understanding almost nothing of what he said, even though I was attuned to the "fit likes?", "damn scunners", "dinna fash", "fine morn's" "driech days" and the "fly cups" of my grandmother's language.

These are tame phrases though compared the doric you hear in the bothy ballads which she would have understood even if she did not use all those words with us.  I know roughly what "being feed" means, a line that appears in A Pair o Nicky Tams (below) even though I could not say where I heard it or how I know.  It has nothing to do with food, but more with being employed or hired. I think there may have been "feeing marts" where people went to look for labouring work.

Here is an easier bothy ballad that mum, despite her memory loss, "minds fine well" as they might say - and from seventy plus years ago: The Muckin o Geordie's Byre. She likes the light-hearted tunes and there seem to be plenty including the still comprehensible A Pair o Nicky Tams (once you know these are strings or straps around your knees that stops beasties running up your legs). Lyrics in doric, with notes.

But they don't sing these at my local folk and acoustic nights - the doric is too impenetrable down here in Perthshire.

Recently I asked Mathew Maclennan, the accordeonist of the eponymous dance band at the ceilidh if they had just played The Muckin o Geordie's Byre to accompany one of the dances.  He concurred and assured me that the bothy ballads are still sung further north. 

In my folk / acoustic group they do sing some traditional Irish / Scots songs like The Wild Rover and Bonnie Dundee (here's local historian Bruce Fummey explaining the story).  Someone did Firethief by local girl Karine Polwart and someone did something else by the contemporary Irish folk group Lankum but such good contemporary folk is rare. The group sing a large number of offbeat, random songs and plenty of Irish and American folk or folk rock.  The Dubliners, The Pogues, The Waterboys and The Corries, even Ed Sheeran and Fleetwood Mac feature regularly along with The Beatles and regular entries from the sixties and seventies, the era of most of the participants.

They don't sing The Blaydon races or The Lambton Worm or Cushy Butterfiield or Sammy Bell, because they are all from the North East of England as sung to me by my uncle and my father but more by my uncle who I recently learned started Guisborough Folk club, nearly fifty years ago.

And all of this is fine and some of it very good but some of the Welsh folk music I heard to accompany a recent TV series strikes me as being another thing altogether.  The Welsh are renowned for their good singing voices so it isn't surprising if their music is very different from the rest of Britain.  e.g. Y Gwanwyn, O Gymru, Wylaf Fil O Ddagrau, Dros y Mynydd Du. I have no idea what any of these songs are about but they have a feeling of community, of songs sung by groups of people rather than dreamed up just for performance which is what I sometimes find a little empty about the songs I hear at the local folk sessions.  

And perhaps this is what I particularly like about the songs I hear from the Americas.  Many of these are still loved and sung by people of all ages and many have lyrics that are explicitly about the place that the song relates to: Lamento Cubano, Lamento Borincano (Puerto Rico) Patria Querida (Cuba),  Luna Tucumana (Tucuman, Argentina), Añoranzas (Santiago, Argentina), El Cosechero (about the Chaco, Argentina), Viva Jujuy (Argentina), Vuelvo (Chile) 5 siglos igual (recognition of Abya Yala's bloody indigenous history in general).  There are countless others.

Generally there is a romanticisation of the pago, the homeland, the going home to the village. But there are exceptions. Initially I mistakenly took Me voy pa'l pueblo - originally a Cuban guaracha -  to be part of this genre of "going home" but in fact it is the opposite. It is about precisely not burying yourself in a corner but about seeing the world - or at least about cheering yourself up by drinking in town.  

It is by Los Panchos, one of Latin America's most famous balladic groups, consisting of Mexicans Alfredo Gil and Chucho Navarro, and Puerto Rican Hernando Aviles.

"Their high-pitched guitars and heartbreakingly beautiful vocal harmonies established the standard for the trio's romantic form across the Spanish-speaking world. They have sold hundreds of millions of records since forming in the mid-'40s and are best known for their interpretations of classic folk songs such as "Besame Mucho," "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas," "Como un Rayito de Luna," and "Sin Ti." They have appeared in more than 50 films and sold out concerts across the globe for more than 70 years. Their influence is unmatched in Latin America, where they are rightfully regarded as one of the top musical trios of all time." [Spotify]

Footnote:

The spirit of 'My voy pa'l pueblo' puts me in mind of Aldous Huxley writing in 'Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday', - a travel memoir of time spent in India, south east Asia and America.  He  argues for personal freedom, movement, travel and against community, stability and ritual:

                                    

Though possessed of a muscular intellect one cannot escape the sense that Huxley was sometimes lackadaisical in exercising conviction, or rather that he had to be roused to do it and that his more common stance was one of observation or at least as he sometimes says, a realisation that those convictions of which he is possessed may very well be a result of the culture and position into which he was born.  

I am put in mind of one the actions of one of his familial descendants, a Thomas Huxley who lives in a village just outside my city, who, during the referendum on Scottish independence acted thus: 

End footnote.

While Irish or Scots folk music can be haunting, especially in modern interpretations, the pleasing complexity of the guitar or guitar-related instruments in many of the folk songs is something I don't find in my local folk music.  There is also a huge range of instruments employed across innumerable folk genres in the Americas. Each paisaje has its own set of instruments and its own genres.  Sometimes it just the caja and the voice in the mountains of north eastern Argentina. Corrientes province of plains and swamps is associated with chamamé (Guarani for: party, disorder) a genre associated with the accordion and so it goes on, endlessly evolving variations of folk music and instruments across the continent. 

The local folk sessions here are about sharing songs, which means someone has to perform a song for the others, though the rest may join in, yet rarely do as wholeheartedly as in the Blaydon Races example above. The musicians obviously connect more in in the interplay of the instruments that most bring, so even if they may not connect much through song the jamming perhaps makes up for this.  

There is one player of the banjo, bazouki and mandolin, George, primarily an accompanianist who has played for fifty years.  His skill is such that the accompaniment shines while never overtaking the main singer or player.  He even supports a weaker musician such that he elevates them while again, never dominating.