Not really a folk song:
“Reuben and Rachel” is a popular song with words written by Harry Birch and music by William Gooch, originally published in Boston in 1871 by White, Smith, & Perry.[1] The song regained popularity in the 20th century as a children’s song.[2]
I didn’t realize that this song was basis for the satirical
Lincoln, Lincoln
I’ve been Thinkin’
What on Earth have you been drinkin’?
It’s a traditional, ‘popular song’ written long ago, with varying lyrics, performed by various people over time. How else would you define a ‘folk song’? The description you posted is basically the classic definition. Many folk songs also become popular as children’s songs.
The variation, plus informal performance contexts, makes it a folksong, even if it didn’t originate as such. Not all iterations are folksongs even now, though: depends on the situation of performance.
—actual folklorist
Folk Song:
- a song originating among the people of a country or area, passed by oral tradition from one singer or generation to the next, often existing in several versions, and marked generally by simple, modal melody and stanzaic, narrative verse.
I think your own supplied definition still qualifies ‘Reuben and Rachel’ as a folk song, IMO. It may have been officially published with authors, but it’s been played by many different people over the years, it’s definitely a simple melody with a narrative verse, and the lyric versions have changed over time.
Sorry CalMeacham-- I do respect and defer to your vast knowledge of the history of pop culture 99% of the time, but I’m sticking to my guns on this one. And thanks @Dr.Drake, for backing me up.
I reminded of the episode of The Simpsons where they met a hobo who regaled them with (his version of) tales of American folklore– including the story of Tom Sawyer, which Lisa insisted is a novel by author Mark Twain.
Thanks for the kind words.
That’s the definition I’ve always heard and used for folk songs, which I distinguiish from songs recently published and of which we know the authors, regardless of their use. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to cut the pages in my copy of The Arabian Nights.
I mean, if you get down to it, every folk song was written by someone. Sometimes we don’t know who it was, but that says something about us and what we know, not about the nature of the song itself.
A fuller answer now that I’m in front of my laptop:
The definition quoted above is a little old-fashioned (folksongs need not be narrative, for instance). In general, though, the popular understanding of folklore is state-of-the-art 1950, and things have moved on. What determines whether something is a folksong isn’t its origins, but its use: do people perform it in informal contexts? Teaching children “folksongs” in school isn’t an informal context, so those aren’t folksongs, even if they were. A lot of music-hall ballads and such were never all that far removed from the folk ballad tradition in the first place, and the more popular were easily absorbed back into folk tradition, which is where the variation sets in. But people are still making studio recordings of those same folksongs.
Then there’s the whole genre of folk music, which mostly has nothing to do with folklore, but was named because a lot of musicians started recording and performing songs they’d learned in folk tradition.
In other words, things go in an out of folk tradition, so pointing to a particular melody or text isn’t really enough to gauge whether something is a folksong. “Reuben and Rachel” certainly gets performed in folkloric contexts, by people who don’t know or care about its origin.
“All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.”
--Louis Armstrong.
Still, if your life depended on it you might try for a year to teach a horse to sing.
“Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.”
–Robert Heinlein
That’s a different reference.
The fable is that a ruler is going to execute a prisoner. The prisoner tells the ruler that if you let me live I can teach your horse to sing in five years. The ruler accepts. The prisoners friend says, “are you crazy. That’s impossible.”
The prisoner says, “Five years is a long time. In five years, I could die, the ruler could die, the horse could sing.”
Almond milk might seem like a new-fangled thing that came about with the rise of fancy coffee shops. It did to me anyway.
But it actually goes back to at least the Middle Ages.
Yeah, most medieval diets were very plant heavy. Not vegan, but not as much meat as you might expect.
And there were plenty of “fast days” where everyone* was forbidden to eat meat (including dairy).
And they had a few creative definitions of “meat”.
