I first started listening to folk music in my late teens. Before that, I was only really familiar with Irish rebel songs, sung by my family on whiskey-fueled evenings at home. But English folksongs were different—dark and knotty, not so concerned with the nation as with the violence between men and women, and between the classes.
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There are love songs, songs of the spring and the landscape, but underneath the surface, shadowy and threatening, we also hear songs of murder, abandonment, betrayal and sorrow. Most of all, these songs appear to me to be the songs of women, and are often offered as warnings against the ways of men.
I have a feeling, sometimes, when I’m reading a book, that it is a sort of folk song. I got the feeling when I read Jean Toomer’s Cane, and J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, and Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure, and even Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes.
But I don’t think there is any such thing as a folk novel. Or perhaps, in a way, the collective of folk songs is the original folk novel; a constant, changing repository of stories.
I don’t know what I mean when I say something feels like a folk song, but perhaps it has something to do with simplicity, though I don’t mean simple as in easy, not at all. I mean simplicity as a sort of refinement and honesty, a repetition of ideas and lines, a distillation of history, tropes and stories, and then perhaps an adornment so small it might make you smile, or so significant it might rewrite something you thought you knew.
Or perhaps, in a way, the collective of folk songs is the original folk novel; a constant, changing repository of stories.
The best folk singers, to me, are those that are like a channel, a vehicle the song is using to be sung, as if the song is always there, waiting in the silence, and the singer is animated by it. That seems so different to our idea of the novelist, who is required to speak about their work, to find an individualized voice, to stand beside their work and account for it.
I once heard someone say, of a singer who was too demonstrative, too concerned with showing off their voice, that when you listened to them you heard the singer, not the song. It was the best way I have ever heard of discerning the way a good folk singer sings, so the song and the singer become one, indistinguishable to the ear, and you’re hearing the song, not the singer.
There are so many images and lines common between folk-songs, and it was the ones describing men that drew me in with their romance and clarity. “His teeth are white as ivory,” “His eyes are black as sloes,” “His hair is like the raven’s wing.”
The opening line, “As I walked out one May morning” is essentially the “Once upon a time” of English folk song. If these commonalities were shared across novels, we would call them cliches. They don’t fit into the “newness” required of novels; they might speak to a lack of imagination.
Perhaps we might say folk tradition is inherently conservative, concerned with the continuation of a version of history, and the novel should always be new. But, to me, that doesn’t get to the heart of it: folk songs can be far more subversive than novels, and the modulation of themes and images is at the core of that subversive streak.
In the song “Willie of Winsbury,” which dates back to 1775, we find the same tropes of many folk ballads: a woman falls pregnant while her father is away, conceals the pregnancy, and is found out, at which point her father (the king) orders the rogue man to be found and hanged.
But when his daughter’s lover is ascertained, the king is surprised. There is the familiar roll-call of images (“his hair was like the strands of gold / his skin was white as milk”), but then the king speaks:
“And it is no wonder,” said the king,
“That my daughter’s love you did win.
If I was a woman, as I am a man,
My bedfellow you would have been.”
When I first heard that song, I did a double-take, wondering if I had heard it right. In that old tradition, which could feel quaint or distant, there was a glimmer of subversion, just subtle enough to open up an entire world of possibility beyond itself, a glimpse into other, less confined places.
In the bars of an old song, an entire history pushes through into the story, and changes it.
The newness is there, but it is elaborated out of familiarity, so it catches us off-guard. Maybe that is what I mean by a novel that feels like a folk-song, the way history can catch us unawares, the way a novel can have an air that is both timeless and that illuminates the present.
Perhaps the most famous instance of a folk song in literature is in James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” from Dubliners, in which Gabriel Conroy sees his wife, Gretta, paused in the stairwell, listening to a singer perform “The Lass of Aughrim,” in which a young woman begs at a door to be let inside:
O, the rain falls on my heavy locks
And the dew wets my skin,
My babe lies cold within my arms
And none will let me in.
The song, mournful and unexpected, sends Gretta into a swirl of memories about an old lover, Michael Furey, who died.
“The song,” Joyce writes, “seemed to be in the old Irish tonality and the singer seemed uncertain both of his words and of his voice. The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief.”
I love the possible slippage in the word “air”–which could mean (and probably does mean) the song, but could also mean that the air in the house is illuminated, changed, made meaningful. In the bars of an old song, an entire history pushes through into the story, and changes it.
It is not the song that is changed, but the people who are changed, or illuminated, by it. Maybe that is what I mean by a novel that feels like a folk-song, the way history can catch us unawares, the way a novel can have an air that is both timeless and that illuminates the present.
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Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt is available via Knopf.