Whiteness even eats White cultures

A week ago, Renee @ Womanist Musings posted a few remarks in order to share with us this video of a Papua New Guinea folk song group singing about the threat to their culture from the White Man, and particularly, of the roles that were played by the 1930s missionaries, and modern capitalist tourism, in changing and eroding their culture.



At the time, I had a sense that the sentiments felt familiar - that they were things I had felt about the culture of England.

While obviously, in recent years folk music has not been threatened by the Church, that has not always been the case. The history of folk and sacred music in Western Europe has been an uneasy one as the two eventually became intermingled despite the authorities' efforts to keep them apart. In Britain, the same musicians who would play the dance tunes on a Saturday night would, on Sunday morning, be providing the backing for the singing of hymns and psalms at the church services. Elsewhere, composers hired to write sacred music would embed in the harmonies of their songs to God, the melodies of popular drinking songs. Eventually, the two would influence each other, but initially, the folk songs of England, just like the Papua New Guinea log drums, were seen as the work of Satan. But I'm getting away from my point.

Show of Hands, a folk-rock duo whose politics seem to straddle the Conservatism of rural England with the radicalism of anti-capitalism (also based on rural ideals), wrote the following song about the loss of English traditional music and culture to (especially USAian) capitalism and homogenisation of popular music:



(It is perhaps telling that a lot of the commenters at YouTube think it's about immigrants destroying our culture - because it couldn't be about White people destroying an indigenous culture, could it?) (Apparently, Show of Hands were angry in 2009 when the BNP used the song on a collection of British folk music - article here)

You can read the lyrics here.

The parts that got me particularly about that song were these stanzas:

After the speeches, when the cake's been cut
The disco's over and the bar is shut
At christening, birthday, wedding or wake
What can we sing 'til the morning breaks

...

And a minister said his vision of hell
Is three folk singers in a pub near Wales
Well, I've got a vision of urban sprawl
There's pubs where no-one ever sings at all

Now, I come from a family that, on my mother's side especially, has a strong sense of musical tradition. For us, there is always singing "'til the morning breaks" of songs old, new, English, American and whatever else. We have a good collection of traditional or indigenous English or British songs that we can sing. This is part of the tradition for me from when I was growing up, along with seeing rapper and longsword dancing (rapper here not referring to musicians, but to the tool used in the North East mining communities), Morris and folk dance.

It's quite a while ago now that the Irish, hosting the Eurovision Song Contest for the umpteenth time, put on a demonstration, in the break between the song performances and collecting the results of the voting, that was derived from Irish traditional dance. The show became an instant hit, and was expanded into a full show in its own right that toured Britain and I think even went to the States.

But Morris dance is seen as a joke by much of England, and it seems unthinkable that a show based on these traditional forms could achieve the popularity that Riverdance did.

The Copper Family Singers (who are from the same part of England as where I live now, more-or-less) come as close as we have today to the traditional sound of England:



When was the last time you heard English singers in a capella harmony, whether original or traditional song?

Another good example is this one, a song that I first heard from my mother:



(Included to stay faithful to my Yorkshire roots! Kate Rusby is awesome anyway.)

***

Now, in England we had the great Victorian and Edwardian philanthropists like Vaughn Williams and Cecil Sharp who saw the decline of traditional English music and song over 100 years ago now, but these tended to be shocked by the filthy content of some of them, and sometimes rendered the lyrics unrecognisable in an effort to make them acceptable to the delicate ears of the "respectable" classes.

The English Folk Dance and Song Society these days works hard to preserve the cultural heritage of our traditional art forms. And yet, very little that is truly a part of our heritage remains a part of common experience - as Show of Hands lamented in their song. The EFDSS is surely better funded than the Papua New Guinea performers with whom I started this rant/musing/ramble/whatever you want to call it. The EFDSS website, linked above, shows the organisation that that money can bring. For that reason, I would not say that the situation of English tradition is the same as that of the people of Papua New Guinea, whatever resonance I feel between them. However, the forces of global capital, and its representation of music as commodity rather than community, are just as threatening and seemingly as close to victory whether it is over the culture of the English folks or the Papua New Guinea folks.

There is still hope. While ten years ago, a government minister opined that folk singers in a bar would be Hell itself, so many times if I've gone into a bar with my guitar, I have been asked to sing. I have sung songs from popular songs like Wonderwall or I Will Survive, to more folk-y fare such as The Water Is Wide or Only Remembered. It seems as though there is still a small space for traditional song and for community music, in this land.

And I, like my (mother's) family before me, will recall and carry on singing the songs that have been handed down to us.