Last Friday morning I stood before a very large group of exuberant teachers to tout the priceless value of folk songs. I had been invited to give the keynote address to the Phoenix-area network of Great Hearts Classical Schools. This one-day symposium was serving as a kind of festive kick-off and included workshops on drawing led by the fine Arizona artist Brighton Demerest-Smith.
Great Heart Schools are an impressive manifestation of the national quest to renew and restore educational standards. Since their founding in 2003, these public charter schools have dedicated themselves to instilling the intellectual rigor that formerly guided the education of most children in America.
The teachers, armed with their confidence in traditional curricula, high expectations, and willingness to nurture students diligently, were but days away from launching a new academic year. In the coming months, this same assembly will shower more than 25,000 youngsters from vastly diverse backgrounds with the time-tested values and masterworks of Western culture.
Any doubter who thinks modern kids can no longer do mental math, master memory work, dive into history, cherish good literature, or produce beautiful handwriting simply has never witnessed the kind of education that goes on inside of classrooms like those of the Great Heart Schools. Students in this chain of schools receive a daily component of the arts including studio art, music performance and theory, as well as folk dance and theater. It’s no surprise that the Great Heart Schools have waiting lists or that their campuses continue to expand, not just across Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico, but also now in Louisiana.
My talk for the symposium focused on how folk songs once were woven into everyday American life. Traditional story-songs (ballads), sentimental ditties, patriotic tunes, game-and-riddle songs, hymns, work songs—such tunes filled the air wherever people labored or celebrated. You couldn’t churn butter, hoe a garden, deck a bower, or mark a festive village event without a treasury of song pouring out of somebody’s mouth. People were born to folk songs; they lived, raised their families, grew old, and died to folk songs. Folk songs passed through the generations much like hereditary jewels. Indeed, they were the hereditary jewels in many a family.
What happened to change this? We turned away from them when we turned our cultural pages following World War II. The trajectory of making natural music with our voices—enhanced perhaps by autoharp, guitar, accordion, or pump organ—deflated or ceased. Parents stopped singing to their children at bedtime. Workers and homemakers filled the silence during the day not by singing, but by pressing the buttons of phonographs, radios, cassette and CD players. Children no longer staged their own backyard musical extravaganzas by flinging sheets over a clothesline. Instead they turned on TVs and videos and sat with bleary eyes and drooped jaws.
The traditional expectation that every child would sing in some kind of choir faded too. Gone far too quickly was the era when radio and movie-studio orchestras recorded lush, invigorating soundtracks for children’s films written by Europe’s and America’s finest composers. Instead, insipid melodies sprouted up, replete with vapid texts, boring harmonies, and homogenous orchestrations. These insidiously addictive songs spread their saccharine tentacles into our kids’ tender ears!
Well, my talk was a combination of rant, group sing-along, therapy session (“If you can speak, you can sing”), and an academic discourse on how folk music and poetry was collected, valued, and promoted by Europe’s best scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries. Happily, the combination of these facets seemed to hit the spot.
Then, in the afternoon, an additional pleasure awaited me. One of the recent graduates of Memoria College’s program “Master of Arts in the Great Books” scooped me up in her car and drove me across searingly hot pavements to the edge of Phoenix to visit an institution many of you may know: the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM). Behind that seemingly innocuous name stands a 200,000 sq. ft. (yes, you read that right) facility that not only contains instruments from every corner of the world but displays them in a highly instructive manner.
The MIM collection represents the world’s classical and folk music in its unfathomable richness and in correct proportions: the familiar European tradition vibrates with extensive, spectacular displays, marvelously arranged to surprise, delight, and instruct. These instruments, though, are but one piece of the puzzle. A far greater number of non-Western instruments are exhibited too. Many an instrument I knew about only from reading a name in an ethnographic text exploded into entire families of instruments—soprano to bass. They positively radiated in the way they are mounted (not much is behind glass here), surrounded by maps, authentic artifacts, spectacular costumes, and even the kind of native art that would express their use. Instruments of importance from isolated communities across the globe actually sounded on large video screens where brief, yet vivid clips can take visitors directly into the performance environment where these instruments flourish.
And what environments these are! For example, several large displays with screens are devoted to instruments and performance practices related to Shamanism. Now that is a term one might read here and there, but the experience of seeing and hearing the intense, hypnotic (tranced) scenes while gazing at the actual instruments used absolutely wowed me.
By comparison, how boring my student studies of world music were! In my time, such music received but a few paragraphs, if that, in standard textbooks. Maybe you could see a black-and white or colored picture to accompany the text or, eventually, hear an excerpt on LP or CD. But the idea of walking through this kind of luxurious collection, row by row, hall by hall, across 200,000 sq. feet? Even now, days later, my mind cannot grasp it.
Now I understand why some people expressed dismay when I admitted previously that, despite visiting Phoenix several times, I had never visited this museum. To offer a pretty good excuse, my time in that desert city has always been dictated by conference schedules, convention hours, or the lack of a car. MIM isn’t exactly “around the corner,” either. In fact, it sits on what (to me) looks like the edge of the desert, all the more dramatic because of its low-slung design, spectacular native landscaping, and natural colors against the azure of the southwestern sky.
But I can tell you this: the next time I’m in Phoenix, I will do everything possible to make another visit. In fact, I told Hank that we ought to drop everything, hop in the car, and drive out to see it. (That would have been easier when we lived in Texas instead of North Carolina.)
Beyond that, expect me to be talking and writing more about folk songs. They are not ancillary. They lie at the core of who we are as a people. Giving them rightful emphasis is overdue in our work as classical educators. I, for one, hope to change that.
Since it isn’t in our national fiber anymore, I’m afraid I need to request a list of some of these folks songs. I’m sure you have a resource for that!
I was just talking with my daughter today about folk songs. I wanted a list of modern ones and by that I mean songs that maybe were once considered pop but have crossed the line into something more for our culture. Do you think it is possible for a pop song to become folk or maybe it is just a classic?
Yep! I know where you got the ‘flinging sheets over the clothesline’!!!
Those were great times!!!❤️
First, let me say Clare Sue knows exactly where we got those sheets: most likely from your mom! She and I grew up across from each other on Cedarhurst Avenue for most of our childhood. We shared literally “the” best times, experiences in play that have given us a lifetime of memories. How blessed we were to have that long stretch of old-fashioned (normal back in our era) run-around-the-neighborhood, highest-tech-being-our-sweet-bicycles freedom of childhood. Also, thank you Malinda, for your comment. We did publish, a couple of years ago, a book called “Hurrah and Hallelujah” (my granddaughter gave it the title). YOu’ll find it in our store, if you are interested. It presents 100 traditional songs, spread across various types from sentimental and national tunes, to game and humorous songs, to rounds and word-focused fun songs, to old-style hymns. We did this during the shutdown, and it fulfilled something we wanted to do both because Hank and I love this music and because we often were asked by people who had either no songbooks like this or theirs were from their grandparents’ generation and were literally (as that paper did) crumbling in the attic. If you wish, you may find that to be a good resource. I modeled it after a book of poetry my mother gave me in 1958 “One Thousand Poems for Children”–a book I’ve written about in several of my weekly essays, and so it has the same look and feel but modern (non-crumbly!) paper, and spiral binding. There are other sources too. Libraries often have older books of folk songs that, these days, alas, get little use and can be borrowed. Often estate sales, used book stores, have such books too. You could ask around on a neighborhood website as many people wish to get rid of things but don’t want to toss them out.
Oh yes, Jessica, absolutely. Did you have certain titles you were thinking about? I’d be curious to know which ones are on your list. Many modern songs have become folk songs. In these cases, those songs will have an author, a composer, whereas much older, traditional ones usually have maybe a poet, but often not even that much, and melodies for, say, English ballads, might be “15th-Century England.” Examples do abound. One that my grandkids just discovered and are singing incessantly now is “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The original was based on a poem by Leonard Lipkin. The music was by Peter Yarrow of “Peter, Paul, and Mary. ” I grew up listening to their first album (maybe I was lucky enough to get a second–one didn’t have very many of such things back then and each was special.) This song had its colorful moments of being interpreted “a la 60s” for a while but that storm has fortunately passed! It is, simply, a delightful song, and not many kids singing it now relate it to Peter, Paul, and Mary or the 50s Folk Movement or 60s or any of that. It simply is just delightful. If there are any associations, there is some kind of cartoon/movie, right, about Puff, a dragon, but I haven’t seen it. But that association will fade too, and it will be the song (!) that will last. Another I think of may be “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine.” When those same grandkids heard it, it immediately stuck in their minds, at least the refrain. AT that point, they didn’t know who the Beatles were. Another is Simon and Garfunkle’s “Scarborough Fair.” It is a parallel with an old Scottish ballad “the Elfin King”–an important song for many centuries and a type of “challenge song” where one character gives out challenges to another. But few people today know it from those words or that style or history, but rather from Simon & Garfunkle’s lovely rendition. I sing this song often as a lullaby and make up the verses, which is one of the things you can do in folksongs and it works, no matter how silly or lame. Songs from musicals in some cases are on the way to being folk songs–lots of them. What about “Oh What a Beautiful Morning?” from Oklahoma, Rogers and Hammerstein. These may not be the best examples, and they may be older popular music than you are thinking. But they illustrate that a song (new, newish) can become popular and then it lingers past its popular period and either lasts or is rediscovered and a new generation just likes it, and sings it, not aware of who popularized it or brought it back to popularity, and not caring either!