...for real. Yes, I suppose the ultimate purpose of musicology is to study style from a particular culture, time, religion, political environment, etc. I guess knowing the difference between songs of some type of cultural persecution or play party songs is a nifty thing. And it is fascinating to study rhythmic foundation, or melodic contours, chordal progressions, scales, modes, etc. That's what makes us really love one type of music or another, those of us who enjoy folk music. We don't necessarily need to know the technical terms and rules followed by a type of folk music to enjoy playing it...I think the music dictates the rules, not the other way around.
But here's what gets to me: seems the penultimate purpose of musicology, possibly inadvertent at times, might be to place a burden of the need for explanation when a person decides to play the tunes. Of course, one never knows if his/her audience is aware of the history of a tune...so there ya go...from the start you don't know if you will inadvertently offend people by just playing the tune or if you will cause the problems by telling the history you are aware of about that tune before you play it. For instance, take My Old Kentucky Home...it's the state song and I've heard it played in a very nostalgic and emotional way my entire life before any event ever, of any size, that I attended as a child with much loved relations and friends. When I hear it today it brings tears to my eyes over the love and appreciation of the parts of Ky i've called home and all the relatives and friends from long ago. The tune itself is absolutely beautiful, aside from words and I guess aside from my own nostalgic feelings an love of the land and people...I think...lol, if I can divorce myself from those feelings and just hear the tune from a blank mind (not much of a problem for me? lol). But anyway, understandably, some descendents of the enslaved have hurt feelings about this song, because the unaddressed horrors of their past ancestry and its residual effects of their daily lives. I understand that. So what has Kentucky done? They've talked about changing their state song...not sure how that would go over...but in reality I don't think I hear that song played at events nearly as often as it was when I was growing up, so maybe today's population wouldn't care that much. Still, there are those who are opposed to that. The temporary answer thus far has been changing the words around to pretend Foster wrote the song about just happy times in Kentucky, not about the enslaved dealing with their lives in Kentucky and knowing if they offended their masters or if their masters had a bad year economically that they'd be sold down the river, where life was even more brutal and most died from the abusive treatment, not to mention the pain of family separation, etc. So yeah...the song is bruised up pretty badly by the inhumane conditions of bygone times. Yet it's so beautiful...and we don't need to even sing it if we can't find good words (the current words are kinda stupid sounding)...I'd be satisfied if we just sang the last line...play the tunes and then at the end sing, "We will sing one song for my old Ky Home, etc." Anyway, the history of what that song invokes cannot be forgotten, but it just doesn't work for everybody as piece of music minus those lyrics, minus those ideas. Same with Pear Tree...a fun fiddle tune. This is one you could play before an audience and most likely very few, if any would connect it with lynching. If you go out of your way to explain the history of that, you're gonna open a wound that might have been covered with enough bandages to just hear the tune, all the great melodic contours, rhythms, and harmonic possibilites minus the crappy history involved.
It's the same with Booth Shot Lincoln. I love that tune, I love the music. I don't love playing something about someone being shot, especially a great leader of our own country who managed to pull us all together at a very bad time and bring about the end of slavery.
There's also a lot of cruelty involved in our American folk tunes. I grew up with the Banks of the Ohio and never even heard the words I sang with my own mouth. I sang it to my own daughter at nights, among other tunes, to help her get to sleep. Then one day when I was the singer for a group of volunteers in our area of SE KY who had come from far away to help out people with stuff...I sang that song and people in the audience gasped out loud and looked horrified. I was shocked. After the song I had to ask the audience what was going on...they talked about the horrific lyrics of murdering a woman and how it seemed so nonchalant and normalized. That was the first time I EVER even heard myself singing that. I told them it was harmless...I heard it as a child and even sang it to my daughter at night...they were even more horrified. Then I was horrified...like...why did I sing a murder ballad, among many other murder ballads, to my own toddler to get her to sleep at night? I really never heard or paid attention to the lyrics. Then I felt I was on the spot there, in front of my horrified audience. I tried to explain to them that for me, it was the music, the tune itself, that I loved, not the ideas or words. They didn't seem to buy that whitewashing...although it was true. I remember telling them I could sing La la la and still enjoy the tune. Anyway, it was probably around 1985 or so when that happened...when I awoke to actually paying attention to the lyrics and possible history of the songs I loved singing so much...it wasn't just la la la...only to me...and it kind of ruined some of the songs. At that point I started kind of looking up some of the history of what I sang for the few and far between times when I got gigs...I attempted to weed them out some and make them less horrible...lol. Also, at the time, my only instrument was a guitar, no money for all the instruments I would love to have had...so leaving out words wasn't such a great option...I didn't have enough cool licks and solos in my bag of tricks to get me through an hour or two of playing.
So for a while I tried to explain that history wasn't always kind, culturally speaking, to all folks. But of course before the internet, I wasn't so sure I had the correct history to tell for one thing, and I didn't feel comfortable giving a cultural/history lesson before each tune...I felt it totally ruined the part I did love...the music itself.
It's not just music with words...it' like, when I attended jams with the little amateur (extremely amateur...lol) BG band I was in for three years or so...if I dared to play a tune someone in the jam would say I didn't do it like so and so...which made me feel like next their gonna call the cops to come and handcuff me. No, I didn't know the exact history of the tunes I loved...I loved for the music...and I've always loved sketching out my ideas on the fly...never in a way that conflicts with the other jammers...they can continue as they want because I never did anything that interfered with the gist of the tune as it was playing. But, I never got permission to play the tunes the way I loved to play them...even though, yes, we all know I'm a slowpoke and love them slow...I always did speed like a demon around the BG crowd because that's the way they like them. Anyway, no I didn' bother to find out exactly how the famous so and so that played that tune a lot did it...I listened only enough to get the gist, and then felt the liberty to love the tune for myself.
I guess multi track recording appeals to me so much for some of these reasons...I still have the lyric issue or culturally cruel and ridiculous things in our past to deal with...but I manage. I love multi track recording for the freedom it gives a person who just loves music...the sounds of the music. To me, it seems all the musicology digging, which in turn dictates to the musician how to play it instead of leaving some artistic license, just isn't very musical. Interesting, yeah, but not so sure how musical it really is.
So here I am being the oddball...the maverick...maybe unjustifiably so...yet...just two cents' worth of my thoughts at the moment, with a good cup of coffee...and always hoping my life circumstances will at some point give me back the chance to play the music again.
Just a thought on lyrics to old tunes. Long ago I had a radio show at the county station here. I frequently played old music I thought was interesting traditional Americana. This was in the early 90s when political correctness was morphing from an insider joke to a self-conscious judgement on various speech, including art and music. When I got negative calls about something like "Banks Of The Ohio" I'd basically tell people to get a life.
There's a difference between advocating violence in the present and sharing quirky art from the past. I have trouble with some rap lyrics now, but I allow the possibility those might ossify into a similar status of old folk in the future. Is there a moral distinction between modern raw expression and preserved works from the past that we now treat as safely curated? I feel there is, and that old folk music, almost by definition, shouldn't ever be considered offensive.
You seem to be lumping everything you don’t like in with musicology and ignoring what it actually is. Players telling you that you don’t play like someone else has absolutely nothing to do with musicology, and it’s something that players do whether they’re educated or not.
Musicologists study the history of music and its essential elements, typically the Western tradition of music and its various compositional styles. They’re not studying the music you’re playing, so anyone that makes comments on it is doing so out of personal opinion. Some of that may be informed by education, but when it’s commentary about similarity to certain versions, that’s coming from a personal understanding of the music and the genre, and since none of that is formalized, those opinions aren’t worth much because they’re often impossible to substantiate. Someone will complain that a tune isn’t played like a particular version, but just wait a minute, and then someone else will complain that the second version isn’t the right one either (that seems to be the gist of the bulk of one poster’s comments on FHO). If you don’t like that there are so many opinions, there either has to be a formal study to establish a finite answer to questions, or you have to find a way to accept that people are people and they will have opinions about everything.
It seems like your posts tend to put blame on institutions for formal learning and the very idea of being literate or educated, rather than on the concepts with which you disagree. I think that blame is misplaced.
Stravinsky said that the more music was constrained and carefully controlled, the freer it was. It worked for him, and it always strikes me that so much great music has come as the result of hardship.
On top of that, plenty of music written as assignment for music school or music written specifically for the purpose of study is excellent music, not unmusical and dull drudgery. Study does not make things unmusical. Learning is not a bad thing. Literacy should not be feared.
Edited by - The Violin Beautiful on 07/07/2026 10:14:43
A murder ballad should be disturbing.
One thing i'm very grateful for is my education...nothing fancy, and had to quit in the middle of grad school...but what I did study and learned in college I am very thankful to have had...I love education and respect all fields of study, and I'm not blaming people for what they study or for factual things that just aren't pleasant to know about.
I guess what I am saying is there are two separate arts going here...stories (mainly true stories or situations) and music. If the story puts a horrible stain onto the music, and the music itself is too beautiful not to play, what do we do? As I said before, I was totally numb to this for a long time even to the point that I actually sang murder ballads to my toddler as she fell asleep at night. It was someone who had not been exposed to such ballads who brought it to my attention how horrific the scenarios were. These were real events happening to real people. After that time, for a while when I played ballads for small audiences I'd usually preface it with how much more sophisticated our own society and culture have become since that time and how the acts of violence and cruelty seem so unreal, unlikely, even sorta silly, to us today. Sily to cut your favorite girl's throat or shove her head under the river. But we all know that's not a good excuse and it's not entirely true.
As to the music itself...yeah, when people insist the tune has to be just like so and so played it or it's flatout wrong...lol...I'm never convinced the famous guy who brought the tune to light by recording it for the first time has the "original" and true version anyway...even if so, why not accept current musicians who want to put their own spin on a folk tune? This is really big in local BG circles, from what I've seen...if you play Faded Love you gotta sound like Bobby Hicks...if you play something else it's gotta sound just like another one...you're no more than a living juke box. That ain't a lot of fun for me...lol. I'm pretty sure, just from common sense, that whoever recorded something first, unless they wrote the tune, just did it THEIR own way. Maybe it was just a lot more impressive than others, but it ain't the only way.
I can't put the music itself down though...well I have to put it down now to take care of hubby 24/7...but I can't willingly put that music down...it's the music I've loved so much throughout my life and feel compelled to play...I'm talking about the rhythms, the melodies and harmonies and all the stuff you can do with them. And sometimes I've just hoped people wouldn't notice the awful things or just wouldn't know about some of the stuff. Sometimes I just fudge on some words to fit the song...cheating to get around that. Why open up old wounds while playing beautiful notes and chord progressions?
There's a local ballad around here called something like The Murder of Pearl Bryan...during the odd gigs I"ve had here people wanted me to sing it...I just can't...maybe because it's so descriptive and graphic, or maybe I'm like the volunteers who hadn't heard my murder ballads before, the newness of this one hitting me in the gut pretty bad...I can't do it. With the old ballads I've known for years, I can't really notice the story because the beautiful music drowns it out for me...it's just "la la la," until somebody points out what I'm singing. With the Pearl Bryan song, I can't really notice the music because the horrific nature of the lyrics drown the music out.
Anyway...I'm just musing here, not trying to put down academia or deny factual things. Just telling of how it's been a conundrum for me for a few decades now. Now that I have no chance to play at all, I guess mainly all I can do is sit and think about stuff like this...lol. Not meaning to cut anybody else down...I think all musicians at every level have a right to do things they feel compelled to do. That's why we've all gone through the blood, sweat and tears of learning to play music in the first place. It seems an earned right, to me. I'm just sayin' what my thoughts for my own situation have become over the years.
I have a hard time understanding the sensitivity some people have to folk song lyrics when I see the ads on my TV for what shows and movies to watch. There's a serious schism when people don't react to the popular entertainment violence that's shoved at us daily, but need trigger warnings for actual news reports and murder ballads from the old days.
quote:
Originally posted by Brian WoodI have a hard time understanding the sensitivity some people have to folk song lyrics when I see the ads on my TV for what shows and movies to watch. There's a serious schism when people don't react to the popular entertainment violence that's shoved at us daily, but need trigger warnings for actual news reports and murder ballads from the old days.
I think it just comes as the result of the popular practice of denigrating history. It's common to see critiques of the "horrible old days" and the terrible and small-minded people who are supposed to have inhabited the past. A bit of study puts this myth to bed, but that takes effort. Effort is reserved for the gym, where you are supposed to put all your attention into criticizing anyone who walks into the frame while you're filming yourself pretending to work out.
People talk about the folk murder ballads like they're uniquely brutal, but an examination of popular music shows plenty of equally or more brutal pieces. Most people don't even realize what the lyrics are about. Songs about teenage suicide, drug use, murder, rape, and stalking are played at weddings with the full lyrics, but they fly under the radar because the melodies are catchy. Modern music is no less violent, but people convince themselves that they've become more evolved by passing judgment on people who aren't alive to be able to refute their ideas.
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Originally posted by Old ScratchA murder ballad should be disturbing.
Well I LOVE "Mack the KNife", and only later did somebody tell me it was about a murderer...! WHat a great piece of music...
... uh ... what did you think it was about?
I dunno! I didn’t really listen closely to the words until pretty recently… :-) Thought he was a gangster or something.
Edited by - NCnotes on 07/07/2026 17:58:41
I never listen to modern day music if I can help it...I just don't like the music part of it, so whatever the lyrics...I don't know. I don't watch TV either...don't like anything I've seen in the past 30 years so the only thing I watch is the Black and White Andy Griffith reruns. So I have no idea what's going on with modern entertainment. I guess I'm lucky I'm just not interested. I'd rather read a biology book...lol...now, that's some excitement I can get into. Richard Dawkins has some good 'uns!
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