Here we go a-wassailing.
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My heart is aflutter with anticipation. In fact, you could say it’s aflame.
I’m pretty sure Dylan isn’t that kind of songwriter. He is a poet, and I highly suspect he wrote the words first. Or maybe not. I don’t know him personally.
Also, I think the reason “a+verbing” is considered “folksy” is due to Appalachian folk singers speaking that way. In other words, I think this is a spoken dialect that became associated with music later on, rather than a purely musical style that people started including in their speech after listening to records, like “doo wop” for example.
You’re probably right. His Nobel Prize was for poetry.
To be clear, it’s an Appalachian thing? I don’t know about that, Slim.
It appears in the book Robinson Crusoe, so it’s been around, and in different places, for quite a while.
“Frog Went a-Courting”http://https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_Went_A-Courting dates to 1548 England.
Okay last post before I hop off and get on with real life stuff…
I can clarify the Dylan stuff but not so much the linguistic origins, although it does seem to be a rural thing. It is a feature of the stereotypical hillbilly patter “a fussin’ and a feudin’” as parodied by the Clampetts in Beverly Hillbillies, Cletus in the Simpsons and by musicians such as Tennessee Ernie Ford (who Dylan admired greatly) and Woody Guthrie (who Dylan pretty much wanted to be) who tended to speak and sing with the “a” prefix a flyin’ this-a-way and-a that-a-way… sometimes it would even appear as a suffix or in the middle of words. I guess you could speculate that it may be a deliberate pacing device used to control the rhythm and cadence of both speech and singing, which coupled with the fact that few people in rural America were literate back in those days created many anomalies and idiosyncrasies in the rural American dialect. Dylan is basically just parroting this way of singing and speaking because that is the musical tradition he is following.
As for the way he writes songs, it’s typically what I like to call the “spitfire technique” where you sit with your instrument and some paper and a pen and essentially write both the music and lyrics at the same time. The process usually kicks off with a chord progression, then singing over the top mostly just playing with vowel sounds until you settle on a melody that feels right against the chords you are playing, then the next phase is singing the first things that come into your head until you start “spitting fire”… and that’s when you pick up the pen and start writing stuff down. Although sometimes a songwriter might find themselves in the zone and spitting so much fire that they get to the end of the song before picking up the pen, at which point they will typically scrawl down as many lyrics as they can remember. Alternatively the songwriter might start “spitting fire” and pick up the pen at which point they put the instrument aside and keep writing according to the pattern and structure dictated by the chords played and the “fire spat”.
But Dylan, like most of the better songwriters or creatives in general, isn’t really a “one way to skin a cat” kinda guy. There are times when a poem will evolve into a song (a bit of early material with an irregular chord pattern was most likely written this way; the songs where he might have to hang on a chord for a bar longer than normal just to fit the words in, like in the verses of ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m only Bleeding)’ or ‘Talkin World War III Blues’) and there are other times when something will start out as an idea for a song (likely born from the “spitfire technique”) and then evolve into a poem if for some reason he decides that the music is getting in the way, or if the words take on a life of their own and refuse to play ball with the music.
In general, for a song writing process to start with lyrics first, or music first, this only really occurs when the vocalist/lyricist and instrumentalist(s) are separate people. Most of the time when the song writer and singer are the same person, “spitfire” is the primary method. This is true for Dylan, John Lennon, Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Bob Marley, just to name a handful. Usually lyrics are refined on a note pad over days or weeks (or in the case of Cobain, not until the very last minute when it’s time to record), any corny lyrics are substituted for some cunning word play or a line about crying like a fire in the sun and voila, you’re cookin with gas.
Hope that was somewhat helpful and informative.
That’s what I was wondering too, I looked for Irish, and Scottish examples but all I could find was “O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road, And I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye” but the afore mentioned song only uses the prefix on the word “a’fore” so it didn’t feel like a strong enough example, even though “fore” and “a’fore” mean exactly the same thing.
Still I had a strong feeling that in rural England as well as Wales, Ireland and Scotland some extra "a"s were bandied around the place. Nice researchin’, Tex.
IANALinguist and I have no cites to offer.
The few times I’ve heard it in the wild were when elders were telling a story. It always seemed to me to imply a stronger intent. If a man went courtin’ he might just be going to flirt. But if he went a-courtin’, why then he meant to bring back a bride. Same with “She was just a-running.” “She was just running” means that’s all she was doing, and she might have been just barely doing it. but “just a-running” means she was doing it with all her might. I have a nagging memory that I can’t quite catch, of Andy Griffith using it this way.
That would appear to not be the case. The etymologies that I see for “kerfuffle” identify it as a construction of Gaelic origin. The “ker-” is from a word that means to turn and the rest is from evocative playfulness.
“I’m a-comin’ Mr. Dillon!”
I wasn’t implying anything about the linguistic origin, that’s just the stereotype of the Appalachian hillbilly I’m familiar with from TV and music. That stereotype may be completely wrong, or it might have passed through Appalachia from some earlier origin. Or some third thing.
I just meant that this is a dialect trait that later got associated with folk music, rather than vice versa. From what original dialect, or what geographical path it took, I don’t claim to know.
I think you’d have had better results if you’d looked at English folk songs. There seems to be an entire sub-genre which stereotypically start with some variation on “As I was a-walking one morning in May” or “… a-going to the fair” or somesuch, and go on to detail how the singer came upon a fair maiden “a-watching her sheep” or “a-waiting for her true love”, who subsequently acts in a very unmaidenly fashion after surprisingly little persuasion.
Here’s one example, but there are many others.
On further reflection, I realize that what I said would make sense only if it was used with the past participle, not the present. From locutions like, “the house is a-building”, it now seems to me that it is likely a vestige of some sort of causitive particle, as suggested above.
Not exactly. “Fore” = front, head. “A’fore” = be-fore, in front, a-head.
Though in some dialects the first syllable of the latter word is elided, “'fore,” so it sounds like the former.
You might say “I’ll be a-leavin’ now” to break up “be leaving” so that it does not sound like “believing”. If the mood is a-striking you at the moment.
From the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, English in North America:
See the link for a nifty usage-data US map and references.
I’ve used the a’ prefix all my life and never lived in Appalachia. While it certainly seems to be dying out, I don’t think it’s quite archaic yet. People in my former workplace used that construction often enough that it was unremarkable even to the transplanted Yankees.
It seems to me that it’s sort of a mild intensifier. A few days ago my SO told me not to start putting in some bedding plants in the garden because he was making dinner. I said “That’s ok, just let me know when it’s ready and I’ll come a’runnin.” It implies an intensity of purpose a little more than saying “I’ll come running”.