The history of traditional folk songs often comes to light in unexpected places. A London diarist heard “Barbara Allen” at a gathering in the 1660s. More than two centuries later, some of the earliest surviving sounds of Korean singing were captured on wax cylinders in Washington, D.C. Neither event marks the beginning of a tradition. Both give us a point at which part of its history comes into view.
That distinction matters. A diary can tell us who sang on a particular evening, a printed sheet can preserve words and a recording can let us hear a singer’s timing and phrasing. Each gives us a different way into a tradition that people kept going by singing, listening and passing songs on.
What Makes A Folk Song Traditional?
A traditional folk song belongs to a repertoire that people pass on and continue to use. It might be a lullaby learnt at home, a story sung to an audience, a chorus used at work or a song people bring out for a particular celebration. The people who know it may remember who taught it to them even when they have little idea who made it up.
Learning by listening and singing is often called oral transmission. In a family, it may happen without anyone sitting down to teach the song. A child hears the same refrain many times, starts joining in and eventually sings it to someone else. A more formal tradition might involve years of learning from experienced performers. Both depend on people carrying the music forward.
A song can have a known composer and still take on a life in tradition. Once people begin to sing it in different settings, they may shorten it, fit it to another tune or keep only the chorus. For a historian, the question of who wrote it is separate from the question of what happened to it after people began singing it.
The term folk song also travels less neatly than it might seem. A community may distinguish songs by who sings them, what they accompany or when they are appropriate. A wedding song and a work song can belong to quite different traditions even if an outside listener puts both under the same heading. The examples that follow show some of the ways singing has been handed on in different places.
Why People Kept Singing These Songs
Songs That Helped People Work Together
A song can give people a shared cue when several of them have to move together. On sailing ships, some shanties helped time a pull on a rope. Others suited a task such as turning a capstan, the device sailors pushed around to wind in a heavy line. The type of effort shaped the singing. A brief, coordinated pull called for a different rhythm from work that carried on steadily.
Even sailors could remember the same song in different settings. In a 1942 recording, the retired sailor Patrick Tayluer recalled “Walk Back” as a song men sang on their way to join a ship with their bags. Other shanty authorities knew forms of it that were used for work aboard ship.
The Library of Congress’s account of Tayluer and “Walk Back” makes it possible to hear him tell his side of the story. Where he remembered singing it is part of the evidence, just as the words and tune are.
When The Work Changes But The Music Carries On
In Bahrain, Fjiri carries memories of pearl diving. UNESCO traces the practice to the late nineteenth century, when divers and crews performed it to express the hardships they faced at sea. A Fjiri performance brings together singing, drums, finger chimes and a clay pot used as a percussion instrument. The lead singer and dancers occupy the middle of the circle.
Fjiri developed on the island of Muharraq, where pearling once shaped everyday life. Performers pass it on through practice and performance, including in music houses known as durs. For someone who has never joined a pearling crew, the gathering offers a way to learn something of that history through sound and movement. Its place in the community can continue even as the occupation it recalls changes.
Songs That Carry Practical Knowledge
Among Garifuna communities in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, songs carry knowledge of activities such as fishing, growing cassava and making canoes. UNESCO’s account also describes satire in the songs and performances in which people watching may join the dancing.
British forces removed Garifuna people from Saint Vincent and held them on the nearby island of Baliceaux. In 1797, the British deported survivors to Roatán, off the coast of present-day Honduras. Garifuna communities later spread along the Caribbean coast of Central America.
Song helped carry language, memories and skills into new places. A verse that makes people laugh at a familiar situation can tell us something about the community, just as a song about making a canoe can preserve details of everyday work.
How The Same Song Develops Different Versions
Try comparing two versions of a song you know well. One singer may have a verse you have never heard. Another may hold a note where you would move on, or give the chorus a different tune. The changes can be deliberate or simply reflect what each singer learnt. You may still recognise the song well before you can explain which features gave it away.
A refrain helps with that. The repeated part gives singers somewhere to come back together even when the verses vary. In a story song, the events can do similar work. Listeners may recognise a meeting, a quarrel and a death even when the characters’ names have changed. Different kinds of songs can survive different kinds of alteration.
Arirang And The Chorus People Can Make Their Own
Arirang is a Korean example of how much can grow around a recognisable refrain. Singers can use the familiar recurring words while changing the lines around them. Tunes and verses differ across regional traditions, and the form leaves room for singers to make new verses of their own.
For its heritage entry from the Republic of Korea, UNESCO reports an estimate of about 3,600 variations across roughly 60 versions. Those numbers describe the scale of the repertoire in that account. They make more sense once you hear how a familiar refrain can hold together performances with different words and melodies.
There was an Arirang on the printed page long before the best-known film version. In 1896, Homer B. Hulbert printed an Arirang melody in the English-language magazine The Korean Repository, with English words below the notes. It is a record of one melody in circulation at the time. National Gugak Center’s entry on early Arirang
Arirang also moved into cinema. A version became the theme of Na Un-gyu’s 1926 film Arirang, giving audiences another way to learn the song. Someone who first heard it through the film and someone who learnt it locally could come away with different ideas of how the refrain ought to sound. National Gugak Center’s account of Arirang adaptations
What Print Did To Folk Songs
A broadside was a single printed sheet. In Britain, printers used broadsides to sell songs about subjects ranging from love and crime to battles and public events. Buyers might also find songs in small, inexpensive booklets called chapbooks. A person who bought a copy could carry the words to another town, sing them at home or teach them to somebody who never saw the page.
Some sheets told buyers which familiar tune to use, leaving the musical notes off the page. This made it possible to sell new words that readers could already imagine singing. The same melody could serve more than one set of verses. Conversely, someone who learnt the words from a sheet could put them to a tune they knew.
The movement worked both ways. A song already in circulation could turn up in print, and a song bought in print could pass from singer to singer. In Britain, where many old sheets survive, the Bodleian Libraries’ broadside ballad collection gives a sense of the scale of the trade. The printed words are evidence of what a publisher put up for sale. A singer who took the words home still had choices about how to sing them.
Barbara Allen In A Diary, In Print And On Record
In January 1666, the London diarist Samuel Pepys heard the actress Mrs Knipp sing a song he called “Barbary Allen”. He described it as Scottish. His description tells us how he understood the song that evening. The diary supplies neither the words nor the tune she used, and it gives no place or date of composition.
A late seventeenth-century broadside in the British Library’s Roxburghe collection gives the song the title “Barbara Allen’s Cruelty”. The sheet tells readers to sing it to the tune of “Barbara Allen” and leaves the music unwritten.
The title puts blame on Barbara before the singing even starts. In the ballad familiar from many later versions, a dying man sends for her, she rejects him, and his death is followed by her own. How the singer tells that sequence can affect how much sympathy each character gets.
By the twentieth century, collectors in the United States were recording singers who knew versions of the ballad. The Library of Congress has a performance by Lillian Short and once issued an entire record devoted to versions and variants.
Listeners could compare what singers did with a story they recognised instead of having to choose a single text as their starting point. For more on the form, see What Makes a Song a Ballad?
What Collectors And Recordings Preserve
What A Collector Chose To Put On The Page
Collectors who wrote down folk songs made it possible to study words and tunes that might otherwise have left little trace. They also made choices about whom to visit and what to take down. A collector looking for songs thought to be especially old might pay less attention to a singer’s newer material. A published selection can tell us much about one part of a singer’s repertoire while leaving the rest out of view.
In England, collecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries supplied material for what is often called the first English folk revival. The manuscripts and books made songs available to singers who had never met the people from whom they were collected. A tune on a page could thus become part of a new performance tradition as well as a record of an earlier one.
What A Recording Lets Us Hear
Sound recording preserves some things that are difficult to recover from written notation alone. You can hear when a singer pauses, where a note slides and how the timing shifts as the story reaches an important line. A recording can also preserve a singer’s spoken introduction, which may explain when the song was sung or who taught it to them.
In July 1896, Alice Cunningham Fletcher recorded Korean students singing in Washington, D.C. The Library of Congress identifies the wax cylinders as the earliest known recordings of Korean music. They include performances of Arirang.
In 2015, folk-song researcher Yu Daean compared two of those performances with the melody Homer B. Hulbert printed in 1896. He identified all three as the same early form, known as Gu Arirang, and found small differences in how the singers approached and ornamented notes. The written melody gives us a point of comparison. The recordings let us hear what the singers did with it.
An archive recording is still one performance made under particular circumstances. A song recorded indoors by one singer may sound different from the same song at a gathering. The date on the recording helps place that performance in history. The song itself may already have been familiar for generations.
How Old Recordings Found New Singers
Recordings also gave later singers material to learn from. In 1952, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music brought earlier American recordings to a new audience. What had once reached listeners through individual commercial releases could be heard together as an anthology.
A musician could return to a particular recording again and again, picking up turns of phrase and details of timing that would be hard to learn from a printed text.
An influential recording can eventually become the way many people expect to hear a song. Someone else may know it from a relative or a local group and find that familiar recording full of surprises. Both listeners bring a history of hearing the song to what they think of as its familiar sound.
How To Trace The History Of A Folk Song
Start With What The Earliest Source Can Tell You
The earliest surviving reference gives you a point by which some form of the song was known. Its usefulness depends on what it contains. A title may show that a song was mentioned or sold. Words tell you what was written down.
Musical notation gives you a tune as someone set it on paper. A recording gives you a particular performance. If the record preserves only one of these, there is still work to do before the others can be traced.
Dates can also refer to different events. A song might describe a shipwreck, appear on a printed sheet years later and be recorded from a singer a century after that. Dating the wreck, the printing and the recording gives you three points in the story. The closer those dates are to one another, the easier it can be to follow the evidence, but each still answers its own question.
Look Beyond The Title
The Roud Folk Song Index helps researchers follow English-language traditional songs across different titles. It gives related versions a shared number so a title change need not end the search. “Barbara Allen”, for example, is Roud 54. Under the same number you can look for entries that give details such as the name of a singer, the place of collection or the source of a text.
A shared index number groups versions for research. If you want to know whether singers used the same tune or how one version might have reached a particular place, compare the entries and their underlying sources. In traditions outside the index’s scope, local names, regional spellings and the names of performers can help you find records that a search for an English title would miss.
Keep The Singer And The Occasion In View
A useful record of a song can be as simple as a few details written down together. Who sang it? Where and when did they sing it? Did they learn it from a relative, at school, at work or from a record? If the singer remembers only a chorus, that chorus may still tell you which version reached a family or community.
Some songs are shared widely, while others belong to occasions or settings with their own customs about who may hear, sing or record them. A public performance and a private gathering can have different expectations. Asking about those expectations is part of learning what the song means to the people who carry it.
Why Traditional Folk Songs Survive
A familiar song gives people something they can do together. A chorus lets someone join in before they know all the verses. A story gives a singer a reason to remember the next part. A song tied to a place can travel with someone who leaves it, then become familiar to people who have never been there.
The documents that survive let us hear some of that movement. A printed ballad can show which version a publisher thought would sell. A wax cylinder can carry voices across a century. When a singer in another town knows a different ending, that ending may be the clue that tells us where to look for the next part of the song’s history.
Join The Discussion
Have you heard a traditional song sung with a different tune, an unfamiliar verse or another ending? Tell us which version you learnt first and where you heard it on the Songs And Poems Forum.
Sources And Further Reading
- English Folk Dance and Song Society: Beginner’s Guide to English Folk Song gives examples of oral transmission, collecting and the Roud Folk Song Index.
- Library of Congress: Lillian Short and “Barbara Allen” pairs an archival performance with the ballad’s early documentary history and links to other versions.
- UNESCO: Arirang, Lyrical Folk Song in the Republic of Korea explains the shared refrain, regional variation and the scope for creating verses.
- UNESCO: Fjiri describes the Bahraini tradition, its connection to pearling and how performers pass it on.
- UNESCO: Language, Dance and Music of the Garifuna explains how songs and performance carry language, history and knowledge of everyday activities.
- Library of Congress: The Alice Fletcher Korean Cylinder Recordings tells the story of the 1896 recordings and includes audio from the cylinders.
