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This chapter deconstructs Cajuns’, and Cajun music’s, folk categorization. It analyzes three separate interpretations of folk culture as espoused by influential public intellectuals. Alan and John Lomax’s famed ethnographic folklore excursions through the American South, with a focus on the individuals and cultural contexts that informed the Depression era Cajun musical landscape, open the chapter. The first Cajun musicians to perform on a national stage at Sarah Gertrude Knott’s National Folk Festival are also included in this study as an example of Cajun music’s attachment to contemporary trends in the public consumption of folklore and the genre’s attachment to the American national project. William Owens’ little know field excursions are then used to demonstrate the perpetuation of Cajun music’ folk categorization.

One of the guiding questions of this study is whether a change took place in the representation of the Greek land with the emergence of the Greek nation state. This chapter looks at the strategies that politicize Greek nature and make it relevant to a German context after the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Greece was declared different from other national movements, and, according to the Romantic correspondence with nature, it was not the Greeks but Greek nature that liberated itself, enhancing its special position. The same imagery allowed for reflection on the German poetic voice and its standpoint in a politically conservative climate. One of the most prominent textual strategies is the use and notion of folk song. The main textual body is the popular poetry of Wilhelm Müller, supplemented with material from political pamphlets and geographical accounts.

Scholars of Shanghai opera accord their tradition, huju, a history of some two centuries or more, typically describing its rise in terms of a development from local traditions of folk song to balladry, and from ballad-singing to staged and costumed opera (in the 1920s). This chapter begins with a brief summary of the history of opera in China to provide initial orientation for the subsequent evaluation of how huju relates to and contrasts with other dramatic forms. The analysis draws on surviving primary and secondary source materials, such as the memoirs of old singers, to assess the question as to how much huju changed as it gained acceptance in the city of Shanghai. The data suggests that the generally cited model of development through stages of folk song-ballad-local opera is in need of revision, and new models are generated.

Nepal's twentieth-century tradition of leftist music, known as pragatisil git or progressive song, developed musically during the 1960s and 1970s along with state-sponsored nationalist genres meant to serve as musical representations of Nepali identity. The differences were primarily in the lyrics: pragatisil git's leftist themes were deemed too incendiary for a regime that forbade political organization. Composers writing songs for the national radio were encouraged to produce love songs, deemed apolitical and therefore safe. At first glance, communist pragatisil git avoids themes of love, in stark contrast to mainstream folk and popular music. Yet, while themes of romance are indeed absent from most Nepali communist music, a closer look demonstrates a strong concern with other forms of love and sentiment. This chapter focuses upon the theme of class love, examining how it is imagined to be socially transformative, and how it has changed through different communist parties' imaginings.

The author investigates the life and songs of Pak Duri, a survivor of the “comfort woman” system living at the House of Sharing. Pak Duri composed, pastiched and sang ribald songs drawn from across Korean folk culture. In so doing she retrieved her own identity and sexuality from a life-long experience of sexual domination and suffering at the hands of men, and she contemplated the nature of female-relations, love, the body, and mortality. She brought the eloquence and the understandings that she cultivated in song and storytelling to bear as a keen participant in the political movement, while from publicizing the songs themselves and certain aspects of the self they sustained.

The last quarter of the eighteenth century was marked by the collection and publication of folk and urban songs, tales, oral poems, and airs. Although several Russian intellectuals including Mikhail Chulkov and Vasily Levshin worked in the inherently connected domains of skazka, folk songs, and theater, it was Empress Catherine II who concocted fairy-tale “comic” opera. Her venture into writing libretti and staging operas paralleled her military and political campaigns. Within about a year she wrote three libretti; during a four-year period she completed and produced four opera-skazkas, Boeslavich, Champion of Novgorod (1786), Fevei (1786), The Brave and bold knight Akhrideich] (1787), and The Woebegone-Hero Kosometovich (1789). They represent different types of Russian operatic tales that blossomed in the following century: magic opera, opera-bylina, and satirical opera. In all of her operatic tales, Catherine endorsed folk songs, old native tales, ritualistic elements, and big traditional princely weddings.

This chapter introduces the context for evaluating Greek Romantic poetry of the first decade of statehood, especially in the so-called Athenian School. It offers readings of works by Alexandros Rizos Rangavis and Panagiotis Soutsos, whose vision of a new literature betrayed a highly ambivalent attitude towards the repertoire of Romantic images, not least because here are writers ‘on the ground’ in Greece. Their use of some of the philhellenic, Romantic motives, especially those pertaining to folk literature, is complex, but they, too, cannot avoid the necessary split into Greek antiquity and European modernity, which leaves contemporary Greece in a limbo, trying to stake a claim to both sides. Their poetry is presented with reference to little-studied material from prefaces to their first editions.

The influence of folk song on chamber music is difficult to divide from that of folk song on music in general. Chamber music is to be distinguished from other music chiefly in its scope and technique; an influence such as that of the folk song is likely to be felt by a composer equally whether he is writing symphonies, operas, or quartets. Therefore, to trace the influence of folk song on chamber music must, of necessity, be a rather arbitrary proceeding, consisting merely of tracing the folk influences on a composer's style generally and concentrating attention on those of his works that happen to fall under the head of chamber music. There is, however, one class of such music which is particularly likely to be influenced by folk song; namely, all that which is of melodic pattern and on a small and simple scale, written for a solo instrument or for two or three instruments in combination.

Any art, if it is to have life, must be able to trace its origin to a fundamental human need. Such needs must prompt expression among people, even in their most primitive and uncultivated state. To this rule the art of music is no exception. This primitive, spontaneous music has been called “folk song,” a rather awkward translation of the German word “Volkslied,” but nevertheless a word that stands for a very definite fact in the realm of music. The folk song must of necessity bear within it the seed of all the future developments of the art. Folk music has, of course, its limitations. To start with, folk music, like all primitive art, is an applied art, the vehicle for the declamation of a ballad or the stepping of a dance, and it is, therefore, bounded by the structure of the stanza or the dance figure. Secondly, folk music is non-harmonic; there is nothing but the melodic line.

The folk song has so many facets that it is not surprising few people can see all sides of the subject at once. Lucy Etheldred Broadwood spent much of her early life in country surroundings at Lyne in Sussex, but the Broadwoods had also a town house that was visited from time to time by many musical celebrities from Europe including Franz Liszt, whose playing of double thirds filled her with admiration. This combination of rural background and urban culture was the basis of her character. Lucy was an excellent pianist and a most artistic singer; her inventive mind was shown in her accompaniments to her collection of folk songs and a few original compositions, which, though slight in texture, show considerable musical imagination. In 1893 her name suddenly sprang into public recognition as the collaborator with J. A. Fuller Maitland on the now-famous English County Songs.

This chapter discusses the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Folk Song Society in England. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a few people saw through the surface, and were beginning tentatively and apologetically to preserve what remained of their local song. Among the collectors was one whose name is famous in the annals of folk song—John Broadwood—who made a small collection of Sussex songs, published privately in 1843. These early collectors had little notion of the artistic value of what they were preserving. Then, about 1890, appeared two epoch-making books: Songs of the West and English County Songs. Sabine Baring-Gould, Fuller Maitland, and Lucy Broadwood recognized the beauty of their collections, declaring them to be the foundation of national art. This led on by natural sequence to the foundation of the Folk Song Society in 1898, with the avowed object of preserving our national heritage of song from extinction.

The Eastern European effort to define folk song as essential to musical value seemed monolithic and unilateral from the Western perspective. However, this chapter shows that Eastern discussions about folk song's role in the creation of art music reveal that there, too, it was difficult to articulate a coherent artistic standard which would perfectly match the political ideal. In both of these cases, Bartók's music serves as a lens through which local judgments about music can be seen in sharper focus.

The revival of folk song and dance has been active for nearly 40 years. The folk dance and song stand or fall entirely on their intrinsic merits. This is one of the ways in which the folk song has evolved. Nobody wants an obscurantist policy; it should not be the object of the Society to recreate outward accidents of folk song and dance. The folk song as a concert singer sings it, the folk dance as a member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) dances it, is necessarily something different from the same tune or dance when collected from a traditional singer or dancer. Surely the dance has evolved, whether we wish it or no, from the first moment that Cecil Sharp taught, to a girl from a factory, steps that he had learnt from a country labourer.

In 1953, forced out of business by postal authorities, Legman moved to Paris. There he turned his attention to a long-planned series, Advanced Studies in Folklore, which he hoped would eventually cover songs, stories, jokes, rhymes, and vocabulary, as well as nonverbal forms like gestures and graffiti. His first volume in the series was anonymous, The Limerick (1954), which garnered him fans in the United States and provided a modest income. Legman moved on to research folk songs in English that had been censored or ignored because of their erotic or obscene content. His “Ballad” project would occupy Legman for decades. As he worked on it, Legman corresponded extensively with folklorists such as Roger Abrahams, Vance Randolph, and Kenneth Goldstein and with archivists at the Library of Congress. His letters reveal his romantic, textual orientation toward folk song and show his efforts to open folklore study to consideration of obscenity and erotica. Legman’s persistent research led to such important discoveries as an unpublished song manuscript by Robert Burns and to a deep understanding of the history of folk song collecting. It also gave him productive friendships with the British folklorists and folk song revival singers Ewan MacColl and Hamish Henderson.

Mr John Broadwood passed on his love of folk song and his belief in its importance to his niece Lucy Broadwood, who added this to her brilliant talents as pianist, singer, composer, and essayist. Among a stiff-necked generation of unbelievers, she believed in the beauty and vitality of English's own national melody. The first fruits of her love of English folk song appeared in 1893—the well-known English County Songs edited by herself and Fuller Maitland. The graceful musicianship of her pianoforte accompaniments to these songs showed, as do also her few published original compositions, a strongly marked inventive gift. When the Folk Song Society was founded in 1899, Lucy Broadwood threw herself whole-heartedly into its work, and in 1904 became de jure what she had been for some years de facto: both honorary secretary of the Society and editor in chief of the Journal.

This chapter discusses Ralph Vaughan Williams's address to the Fifth Conference of the International Folk Music Council. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) exists for the purpose of preserving and disseminating the folk songs and dances of England in their traditional forms. However, the disseminators and the preservers do not always see eye to eye. The disseminators are so anxious that the whole country should take a practical part in the discoveries that they are sorely tempted to put quantity in the place of quality. The preservers, on the other hand, are too apt to allow folk song and dance to become a dead art, an affair of libraries and dry discussion. Williams has no quarrel with popular music, but he does feel that the International Council should confine itself to what is truly traditional.

This chapter describes the seldom acknowledged cultural impact of Koreana on imperial Japanese popular entertainment. It examines specific examples that were genuinely popular in Japan—folk songs such as “Arirang” and “The Bellflower Song” (“Toraji t'aryŏng”), imagery of kisaeng (courtesan-entertainers), and the choreography of Ch'oe Sŭng-hŭi, one of imperial Japan's most prominent celebrities. Koreana was most popular in Japan at a time when assimilation pressures in the colony itself were becoming more forceful. With the onset of war in China and the Pacific, the colonial regime's highest priority was to knit Koreans more tightly into the fabric of the empire so as to ensure their loyalty and deploy them more effectively for the war effort. This included much tighter censorship of Korean-language media, tougher enforcement of “national language” policies and mandatory shrine visits, and the Name Change (sōshi kaimei) Campaign, which compelled Koreans to adopt Japanese names. There remained, however, a place for what was distinctively Korean, as a charming indicator of the multiplicity of “local colors” that constituted the new cultural order of Japan's empire.

This chapter deals with English folk song and does not try to touch the sister art of ballad poetry, though many of the conclusions that it attempts are equally applicable to the folk words as to folk tunes. The study of English folk song is of comparatively recent origin. For years musicians and scientists, while fully recognizing the existence of traditional music in every foreign country, and even in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, denied, for some inexplicable reason, there being any in England. It was considered that England was an unmusical nation, and that music was a sort of hothouse product to be imported from a foreign country and left to drag out a half-starved existence far from its home. It is difficult to see how such an art could be of any benefit to anybody.

Arthur Somervell was one of the first products of the contention that the musician's art should be the consummation of a liberal education, which Somervell obtained at Uppingham School and King's College, Cambridge. He learnt to look on folk song as the foundation of musical culture, and when he became a power in the educational councils of the nation he lost no time in putting that theory into practice. Unfortunately, in those days, opinion on the true nature of folk song was very inchoate, and in a Blue Book published in 1906, while on the one hand the use of folk songs in schools was strongly advocated, at the same time the list of songs printed to support this view had no connection with true folk song.

This book describes early reactions to folk songs through John Stainer and Henry Ramsden Bramley's Christmas Carols New and Old. Stainer and Bramley's book contained some pretty poor stuff; nevertheless, it was the means of introducing to the public for the first time some of the most beautiful traditional melodies. One of the by-products of the William Morris movement was the cult of the Christmas carol, especially the “Cherry Tree” carol tune, which has remained a fragrant possession to my mind, much more beautiful than later discoveries to the same words. This is how the folk song can stimulate the composer. England has been laughed at for trying to form a national style by tacking on that bit of English folk song to a hotch potch of Richard Wagner, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Claude Debussy.