Further Antedating of "Folk-Song"

[Jonathan Lighter]

My apologies, Fred, for not checking the Archive.

For these early writers, it seems a true "folksong" had to be known and
appreciated by either everyone (national anthems were important examples),
by a significant number of the mostly unlettered "folk" (who were the
mystic carriers and custodians of the nation's true "genius"), or else by
scholars who had the intuition to recognize that peculiar genius in
polished works of literature.

Literary adepts reworked the genius of the folk into masterworks
representing the "true" national spirit. Thus Palmer's "Folk Songs."

It was all rather murky.

JL



On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Further Antedating of "Folk-Song"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Here is an earlier citation I posted in 2006.  This one illustrates that
> some of the "folk-" compounds were formed on German models, sometimes being
> older than the English term "folk-lore":
>
> folk song (OED 1870)
>
> 1843 _Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review_ Jan. 57 (Periodicals Archive
> Online)  The lais, as folk song, as epic song, and as historic song, the
> lyric lais, and the German leiche, the church sequence, and the cloister
> prosae and
> cantilenae, are all most abundantly discussed.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of
> Jonathan Lighter [wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Friday, January 11, 2013 8:06 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: antedating "folk song"
>
> 1870: OED (with "folk's song" in 1847).
>
> 1860 John Williamson Palmer, ed. _Folk Songs_ (N.Y.: Scribner).
>
> Palmer's anthology does not consist of "folksongs" in the modern sense: a
> good indication that the sense was not then familiar.
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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