pnArt

Collaborative creation with strangers; borrowing bits of music and making something new;  adding your own ideas or verses to someone else’s work;  applying an old song to a new social or political situation – and not an intellectual property right to be seen.

Web 2.0?   Open source?   No - traditional folk music.

For centuries, long before there were record companies and the DMCA, this was how people made their music.   Folk music really was the “people’s music”, arising from their shared experiences and expressing their feelings and opinions.   The “same” song appeared in many guises, with new lyrics, different subject matter, or with changed endings.   Sometimes the sailor got the girl, sometimes he got hanged.  Sometimes Shenandoah was a Native American chief; sometimes Shenandoah was a river.  Change some lines and a protest song about the king’s taxes becomes a protest song about cruel mine bosses.  Change a few words and a windlass shanty becomes a logger’s shanty on the other side of the world.   Songs often referenced each other and the same stanzas would be borrowed and reappear in hundreds of different songs.

Traditional folk music is social history and one of the world’s finest interpreters of English folk music, Louis Killen, graced us at a Folk Song Society of Greater Boston house party in Brookline on June 11.

Killen, who’s 75, was born in northern England.   He lived in the US for several decades before recently returning to his native land.  He’s been a sailor and shipyard worker in both the US and UK and throughout it all he has gathered and recorded a vast collection of traditional music and he’s worked with Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl, A.L. Lloyd, among many others.

Killen is best known for songs of the English miners, especially union and protest songs, and for sea shanties – sailors’ work songs used to establish a rhythm for hauling or other repetitive tasks.

The concert was wonderful.  Killen often sang unaccompanied, although on some songs he played a concertina.    The house party setting -  a Folk Song Society tradition -  made it seem much more like an informal gathering in a friend’s living room than a concert, even though there was a small admission fee.  Killen did his best to eschew many of the songs he’s best-known for, instead introducing us to some less well known material.   But he also sang some pieces we all knew and the room sang along.    Near the end of the evening both his voice and his memory started to give him trouble and this only served to remind me to treasure these moments with the old breed of folk singers.

And we had some special treats.   Another internationally-known folklorist, Norman Kennedy, from Aberdeen, Scotland, was in the room.   And he sang a long, fascinating, and very Scottish version of a song that I eventually recognized as a version of “Cruel Sister” (AKA “Binnorie” “Wind and the Rain”, “Two Sisters”, “Twa Sisters”)  but he was halfway through before I realized what it was.    And a member of the new generation of English folklorists, Sam Lee, from the English Folk Dance and Song Society, was also present and he, too, entertained us with his singing, offering new hope that this remarkable history written in music won’t be forgotten very soon.