As with so many things, a simple mental association double checked through the lens of a ‘quick Google’ yields a seriously mind-boggling rabbit hole. This blog post serves as a contextual supplement to this video:
I have had the topic of names on my mind for a long time. Anyone who plays traditional music will know that the name of any given tune is, shall we say, flexible. The way in which a lot of trad music works is that any given player or performer and certainly the more reputable recording artists will cite who’s version of a tune they play, where they have introduced changes, and will often also indicate if their own regional style has affected their playing or not, etc. A living folk tradition needs both that kind of flexibility as well as that kind of connectivity and accountability.
Recently, I decided to approximate a version of Shady Grove, pilfering most of my style and technique from this OLD video by “Gretchenman” (just look at his fingers fly!!!):
In doing so, I did a quick search online to refresh my memory about the lyrics (because I do sing along sometimes when I play) and check in on some basic background information on the song. Shady Grove (Roud 4456) is mostly considered an Appalachian tune [1,2] and there is a possible link with the English/Scottish tune Matty Groves (Roud 52; a famous version of which was recorded by Fairport Convention, for example) [3]. The two songs share the same melody and the fact that one is a murder ballad and the other a song in which a woman’s name has seemingly toponymic qualities interested me from a personal gnosis perspective. Drawing wild and highly metaphorical connections in my own head, I liked the familiarity of something that sounds like a place having an almost euhemerised quality… certainly Ireland abounds with such locations and its medieval literature/mythology has whole genres and stories centered on naming places after people and people after places, or just blending the two entirely.
Now, I’m NOT claiming that there is any such analogy to be drawn in historically viable or collectively verified ontological* terms. It’s just a fun poetic exercise. Creative license, as it were.
However! The rabbit hole referred to earlier drew me from link to link: first investigating the lyrical content of Shady Grove; then to it’s Roud Index Number and associated articles about the development of the song over time (including various collections in which it is annotated as well as different known recordings of it); then to re-acquainting myself with some of the basics on Cecil Sharp (because it’s been a while). Lo and behold… I forgot a) about his nationalism and the troubled legacy of his methodology in seeking out ‘Englishness’ in music, especially in Southern Appalachia [5] but also b) that he was in other ways influenced by William Morris’ socialist lectures and …potentially also approached his work through the lens of spiritualism at some point!? 🤯
This last bit seems totally unclear to me and I am finding it hard to validate until I can actually access some of the academic articles I’ve found online [6]. (This is where I am REALLY happy to have a free external reader’s card with UCC Library…ah, the perks of living in a Uni town!) But in scrolling through the Roud listings on Matty Grove, I saw they had an entry in Sharp’s diary from the 29th of August, 1916 in which he makes use of the word “séance”.
It’s strikes me that it’s possible this word has some other meanings or context of which I am not aware (I yielded no obvious or immediate answers from a quick search online) but it would seem there are a few articles out there at least that might make this clear once I’ve had a chance to read them. In theory, it doesn’t strike me as too unreasonable because this IS a time period in which a lot of academia (especially those with nationalist or otherwise politicised interest in folk movements) drift in and out of spiritualist circles and ‘methods’ of inquiry**.
I am not sure how all of that will go yet but I also hope to read a few more recent assessments of the problems in Sharp’s legacy.
Magickally, one of the things I am doing in playing such a tune (in which I usually face my altar, by the way) is reshaping identity. Drawing creative connections on the euhemerization of names, of nouns as names/names as nouns, and asking questions of my own anthropopathism and ‘pathetic fallacy’***.
At this point, the choice to play “Flatlands” by Chelsea Wolfe and Mark Lanegan over the first part of my video should begin to make added sense.
It all comes back around to walking the razor edge between what seems appealing as a creative or metaphorical idea and what is actually academically and historically viable work. We have to be okay with their inherent dissonance. You might even call it… an art.
~ Saoirse.
PS. If you head to the Vaughan Williams Lectures page I only JUST noticed that they have a nearly 50 minute lecture: “There’s method in the magic: the theory behind folk magic in medieval and early modern England by Tabitha Stanmore” FROM 2020. Why am I so slow on the uptake!!?? I haven’t watched it yet but will do soon! 🤩🤓🥳
* Here I am using the philosphical defintion of ‘ontological’ rather than the metaphysical one!
** Giving the Golden Dawn, Theosophists, and soooo many 19th and early-20th century artists and thinkers bombastic side-eye. Criminal offensive side-eye.
*** Oop! Hello, Ruskin!
§ 9. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.
§ 10. I separate these classes, in order that their character may be clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of ‘alterability‘. […]
§ 11. Now so long as we see that the ‘feeling‘ is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces: we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley’s, above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow. [7]
- (1) Shady Grove (Roud 4456), Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music, mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/shadygrove.html. Accessed 6 Feb. 2024.
- (2) “Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: Shady Grove.” English Folk Dance & Song Society, http://www.vwml.org/search?q=Shady%20Grove&is=1. Accessed 6 Feb. 2024. (Of note, the English Folk Dance & Song Society owns the Cecil Sharp House.)
- (3) Spiegel, Max. “Origins: ‘shady Grove’ a Mondegreen ?” The Mudcat Cafe, mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=131461. Accessed 6 Feb. 2024. (“Mondegreen” is my new favourite word now. Story of my hearing impaired life!)
- (4) “Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: Little Matty Grove.” English Folk Dance & Song Society, http://www.vwml.org/search?q=Matty%20Grove&is=1#.
- (5) “Cecil Sharp.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 Jan. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Sharp#Political_Views. (Yes, its Wikipedia ~ but the citations at the bottom of the article look like they’re worth exploring.)
- (6) Zon, Bennett. “Folk Musicology (Chapter 3) – Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture.” Cambridge Core, Cambridge University Press, 25 Oct. 2017, http://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/evolution-and-victorian-musical-culture/folk-musicology/CD9C631EAD127C74867F87D718429351. (One resource among a few that I have bookmarked… I’ll hopefully get my hands on these soon!)
- (7) Ruskin, John. “Of the Pathetic Fallacy from ‘modern Painters’ (Volume III, Pt. 4, 1856) by John Ruskin.” The Pathetic Fallacy, Ruskin (1856), http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/index.htm. Accessed 6 Feb. 2024. (I have no interest or affiliation with the author of this site as a whole, this link is simply where I have accessed an online free readable copy of Ruskin’s writings on the Pathetic Fallacy.)