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WAR POETRYENGLISH 685:002 / SUSAN TICHY / FALL 2005WEEK 6: OCT 6: WAR IN BRITISH FOLK SONG |
WAR POETRY MAIN PAGE
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This week your first set of written assignments are due. Guidelines are here. So we'll take a little break from reading. READING (a little) & LISTENING (a lot): Please listen to the songs, first and foremost. A song list and notes will be sent out by e-mail. Read those, along with the notes below. After a few times through the songs, start focusing on a few you'd like to talk about, or ask about. Listen to those again. Think about how a song differs from a poem on the page, how music creates affects that in print poetry must be created solely by words. It's all right if you are attracted to a song for the sake of its tune: that's what makes it a song. Think, too, about some of the issues we've
talked
about in the poems. What about corpses? bodies? gender? weapons and
machines? Are the songs "pastoral"? Ironic? What is the relation
between "front" and "homefront"? And where is power in these songs --
who has it? who defines it? My gloss on Scots words and phrases in Sicily & Victory Hoe-Down. Alec Finlay: more notes on Henderson IN CLASS: As in any anthology, many of the songs are
provided as
context for the few we’ll talk about. We will certainly talk about
Hamish
Henderson’s World War II songs. I’ll talk about the formal and
structural differences
between traditional ballads and modern folk songs – which will perhaps
shed
some light on why the Farewell to I'll also talk about differences between the
living tradition of ballad and folksong and the always already belated
genre of "ballad" in literary contexts. In this vein, I included this
rock recording of the Trooper and the Maid not only to make a companion
to Henderson's "jolly soldier" side, but also to demonstrate the
tradition's mutation and survival in generations younger than
Henderson's. The songs I've chosen deal with wars and armies going back
to 1513, yet the very fact of their currency in a live singing
tradition makes them part of the
debate about war in our time. Alec Finlay, from "A River That Flows On: A critical overview of Hamish Henderson's life and work," an afterward to The Armstrong Nose: Selected Letters of Hamish Henderson, edited by Finlay. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996. Notes on the beginning of Henderson's career as a scholar of folk song. Page numbers follow. A period of transition followed the literary success of the Elegies. A key event, and one which had a great influence on Henderson's outlook, was the memorial meeting honouring the, 25th Anniversary of John MacLean's death in Glasgow, November 1948, which Henderson helped to organize and chaired. He addressed the rally and his song, 'The John MacLean March', [was] composed for the occasion… The important influence of his political beliefs, his 'revolutionary humanism', on his art is borne out by the way so many of his folksongs have been composed with specific political events in mind. Then, in the Spring of 1950 travelling on the prize money he received from the Somerset Maugham Award [awarded for the Elegies], he set off for Italy. His reason for returning there is described in a letter to MacDiarmid 'I am working hard [translating] Antonio Gramsci's Letters from Prison, a book of the first importance. G. was certainly the most important Marxist thinker outside Russia in the period 1920-35.' Henderson had first heard of Gramsci from his comrades in the Resistenza; and later, in 1950, he met Gramsci's friend, the political economist Piero Sraffa, at Cambridge. Henderson was therefore one of the first people outside Italy to be in a position to recognize his political and philosophical importance. Receiving Gramsci's writings as they were published in Italy, their influence on his own thinking was immediate. Gramsci makes a crucial though unacknowledged appearance in the phrases, 'a literature of presentification' and 'pluralism of superstructures' in [Henderson’s essay] 'Flower and Iron of the Truth'. His theoretical writings shaped Henderson's campaign to revive the Scottish traditional arts over the course of the decade. He was the justification for a political utilization of folksong, as Henderson writes in his Introduction to the Prison Letters, 'fostering an alternative to official bourgeois culture, seeking out the positive and 'progressive' aspects of folk culture.' 313-314 Henderson's journey to Italy was an overtly political project, a turning aside from his literary career. If the Folk Revival was also consciously planned, its beginnings can still best be traced to a chance encounter one signalled in a letter Henderson received from his friend Ewan MacColl in February 1951, warning him of an imminent arrival: There is a character wandering about this sceptred isle at the moment . . . Alan Lomax. He is a Texan and the none the worse for that, he is also about the most important name in American folksong circles. He is over here with a recording unit . . . Columbia Gramophone Company are financing his trip. The idea is that he will record the folk singers of a group of countries . . . He is not interested in trained singers or refined versions of the folksongs . . . This is important, Hamish. It is vital that Scotland is well represented in this collection.With the synchronicity of this meeting all of the elements that would gel into the modern Folk Revival fell into place. 314 When McCarthyism forced Alan Lomax to temporarily quit America, he brought with him a piece of machinery already in common usage amongst collectors in the States, which became the chief weapon in the armoury of the Revival, a tape-recorder. This made possible a fidelity to the oral tradition, a ‘presentification’ of the spoken and sung voice, creating a new kind of Revival in which the oral arts remained predominant, rather than print, which had always come to dominate in the past. 315 The primary aim of the Revival was, firstly, to record these songs and stories; and secondly, and in a way even more importantly, to create a renewal of these traditions, especially among the young, so that the material could be preserved in its only true form, a living interpretation. The Revival was, as Henderson admitted, an intervention, a synthetic means to reassert a traditional process. Once it was initiated, and modulated by the influence of the living tradition, he believed that it would become self-perpetuating, as indeed it did. 333 HENDERSON'S SONGS: Gloss on the Scots & a some notes on "51st Highlanders Farewell to Sicily"Dick Gaughan glosses Ewan MacColl's "Jamie Foyers" and Henderson's "The John MacLean March" & "The Freedom Come All-Ye." Featherstone offers a partial gloss of "Sicily" and "Victory Hoe-Down," but not enough for most American readers. These glosses are mine--“Victory Hoe-Down” hoor = whore, meenit = minute, ‘oor = hour, tanner = tenner, taigle = tangle, sonsy = friendly, plump, comely, reel-raw = a disorder, and a pun on the ‘reel’ they’re dancing lowpin like a mawkin = leaping like a hare, oor = our, steer = stir, commotion, dames fae hell = ladies from hell, a German nickname for the kilt-wearing Highland troops, glentin cramassies = glinting crimsons, dudelsack = bagpipe, breeks = trousers, douce = pleasant, respectable, Musso = Mussolini, fae a Billy tae a dan = from a Protestant to a Catholic tyke = dog, beery = bury, loon = rascal or fool, Kesselring = German Field Marshall, ding doon = knock down, bring down, dee = die, pree = taste, partigiani = Italian partisans, rory = something big for its kind , crood o’ bams = crowd of bums, auld Hornie = the devil gie’s anither twal drams = give us another twelve drams 51st (Highland) Division’s Farewell to Sicily dozie = stupid or stupified / pipie = pipe major, the boss of a bagpipe band fey = doomed to die, or more generally behaving oddly [originally included the idea of being under the influence of fairies or spirits] he will-nae come roon for his vino the day = he won’t come round for his wine today unco = strange, odd, spooky / bricht = bright / chaulmers = chambers / shaw = thicket or wood Jock = slang for a Scotsman / kyles = straits / puir bliddy swaddies = poor bloody swaddies (privates) smoor = cover, smother / wiles = wiles (as in guiles) or wilds drummie = drum major, boss of the drummers in a pipe band / ava = at all braw = brave, fine, splendid in dress / beezed himself up for a photy = slicked himself up for a photo shieling = shepherd’s hut / ha’ = hall / a’ = all / shebeens = drinking dives, often illegal ones bothies = farm workers quarters, a term with strong particular associations in Scottish folk song, b/c of a genre of singing/songs ("bothy songs") that flourished among farm workers in the 18th & 19th centuries / drub = scold or beat Henderson was an intelligence officer attached to the 51st and served with them in North Africa and Italy. After waiting some weeks in Sicily, expecting orders for home, the regiment received orders for the Normandy landing. Henderson received different orders, so their embarkation for that bloody campaign was also his farewell to them. He has described watching them embark and hearing this song come into his head almost as hallucination. (He tells the same tale in more mundane terms on the CD.) The words are set to the pipe tune "Farewell to the Creeks," which was written during World War I. Dick Gaughan has recorded "Sicily" twice, and has this to say about it: Piobaireachd [that's Gaelic; in English spelled pibroch] is the classical music of the bagpipe. It is technically complex and, though wordless, originally evolved as a narrative or memorial music. Many are now played in fragmented form, but a full pibroch may be 45 minutes long. A few are twice that length. As you will hear, Gaughan's second recording of "Sicily" is quite slow, quite long (though nothing like a pibroch!), and, as he said, allows each note to "decay almost to silence." He also changes the sequence of refrain lines, withholding the line "puir bluidy swaddies are weary" until the end. He has said he thinks his interpretation of the song is conditioned by the fact that, unlike Henderson, he belongs to a generation that was not sent to war.(2) I take this to mean that a soldier's jauntiness has been replaced by the elegiac sense he mentions above, and an urge toward memorial meditation. (1) Web page notes to Kist o Gold: http://www.dickgaughan.co.uk/discography/dsc-kist.html June 15, 2002. Optional Reading: Featherstone: Part III: Slater: from 'Bless ‘em All', |