LL-L: "Songs" LOWLANDS-L, 12.OCT.1999 (03) [E]

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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk]
Subject: "Songs"

> From: Roger P. G. Thijs [roger.thijs at village.uunet.be]
> Subject: LL-L: "Songs" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 10.OCT.1999 (01)
>
> Well actually, I guess one still has the underground song codices
> at Belgian
> universities .
> I remember I have had a several of them, but 2 decades ago I have turned
> them all in to the "Dr. Mon De Goeyse archives" at Leuven
> University.

I wonder if the tunes to those are preserved? The reason I ask is because
although bawdy songs are often parodies of other songs, it can work the
other way as well. For example, one of the most famous Scottish folk songs
(at least within Scotland) is "Green Grow the Rashes". This is one of the
many songs "collected" by Burns, and a very memorable melody it has too, but
if my reading of the scholastic notes in The Merry Muses is right, the song
itself was originally a bawdy, and Burns rescued it, not by simple
bowdlerisation, but by rewriting it completely, but keeping something of the
humanitarian themes of the original in mind. The end result is certainly
worth preserving.

It goes to show that bowdlerisation needn't necessarily ruin a song - it's
only the mindless cut-and-paste methods of typical bowdlerisers that are the
problem, e.g. substituting "father" for "husband", "lips" for "bosom" &c.
Perhaps Burns added significantly to the stock of Scottish folk song because
he was happy for two completely different versions of songs to exist side by
side, rather than trying to produce something to stand in place of the
socially unacceptable version.

Another important aspect of this sort of collection (judging by my own
experience) is the preservation of aspects of language that have been
supressed by lack of social acceptance. In attempting to write a modern
Scots novel (I'm on my second now) the Merry Muses is invaluable for finding
out how Scots people spoke about sex, clothes, human relations and the
humour thereof, before people stopped speaking openly about these things. In
the past few decades, people have re-learned a lot of this sort of thing
from TV, books and magazines, but these are all in English. Another aspect
is that these songs are often less self-consciously literary than more
acceptable texts and can bring one closer to the real language than what the
poets wrote when they were trying to be serious - it tends to give a
completely different register from the other texts of the time, and this is
valuable in itself. So these texts would reward the study of anyone who was
interested in the maintenance of minority languages. I feel I should give an
example after all this talking in the abstract for the sake of decorum, so
selecting one of the politest from the Merry Muses and looking at what we
can learn:

WAP AND ROWE

Wap & rowe, wap & row
Wap & rowe the feetie o't
A thocht A wis a maiden fair
Till A heard the greetie o't

Ma daddie wis a fiddler fine
Ma minnie she made mantie, O
An A masel a thumpin quine
An tried the rantie-tantie O.

Because of the different register, the following words all seem new to me,
but because of the fact that it's natural rather than literary Scots, and of
course because there's a context, I feel confident about using them:

greetie - here seems to be used as a noun to mean the sound of crying - SND
only gives the meaning "weepy".
mantie - cloth, haberdashery material
thumpin - buxom
rantie-tantie - rumpy-pumpy

By the way, this song illustrates one of the things I find most puzzling
about the Merry Muses - a very large proportion of the songs seem to be
written from a woman's point of view! Why should that be?

Sandy
http://scotstext.org

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Songs

Thanks for the insight above, Sandy.

I am still somewhat confused.  These songs are virtually always presented as
Robert Burns' own.  Are you saying that he had just "discovered" them and
"jazzed them up" (like the Grimm Brothers did with the folktales)?  He must
have been quite a daring and colorful character to come out with them, because
there certainly are some surprisingly naughty songs among them.  Of course I
won't share the lyrics here, but I remind Lowlanders of the likes of "Gie The
Lass Her Fairin'," "(A Ribauld Version of) Green Grow The Rashes" (which you
mentioned), "The Lass That Made the Bed to Me," and, most certainly not to
forget, "{snip} {snip} Will Please a Lady."  (Not even the full title can be
mentioned here.)

Yes, indeed, these songs, like all other texts, offer us rare glimpses into
otherwise glossed-over aspects of life and fantasies in times gone by, and
then we realize that there's hardly anything really novel these days.

You asked:

> By the way, this song illustrates one of the things I find most puzzling
> about the Merry Muses - a very large proportion of the songs seem to be
> written from a woman's point of view! Why should that be?

Could it be because men tend(ed) to find it more titillating to "hear" such
things related from the point of view of a supposedly innocent girl gone
astray, just like the stories and novels written by men through women's voices
now and then, older examples being "Moll Flanders" and "The Story of O"?

Best regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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