#i dont even like martin carthy particularly but paul simon owes him so much money. scream

[cruelsister-moved2]

hey kind of weird question but i saw a post of yours from a couple years ago while searching some random tags and you mentioned having some opinions about anais mitchell (presumably her recorings of the child ballads?) and the whole coffee shop au-ification of balladry (particularly tam lin) and that resonated so hard with me so i just thought i'd ask you to elaborate more on that because i genuinely want to hear what you have to say. also i fucking love angela carter

oh man... I mean first of all I just reject the term 'child ballad' out of hand nowadays because like fjc was some random racist eugenicist middle class american academic borderline-hobbyist who never even heard a folk song in the wild and basically just compiled stuff other people had already written down. so even if I pretend to subscribe to the ownership of the collector, which I don't, we never refer to 'sharp ballads' or 'percy ballads' or even 'burns ballads', despite the fact that burns was actively re/writing his. add to that the fact that like a third of child's collection came from a specific, named woman (Anna Gordon/Mrs Brown of Falkland) and you start to get angry at the anonymisation&dehumanisation of 'the folk', especially when you learn that child's ballads made him rich yet socially humiliated mrs brown. she (along with numerous other women + burns as a kind of anomalous man) was working actively from inside a tradition, but we instead default to the authority of the prejudiced outsider because of romantic beliefs about the naivety of 'the folk'. (if anything, child actively harmed the tradition with his completely arbitrary subjectivity + not collecting any fucking tunes...)

the very notion of folk music as just this organic wellspring that just emerges naturally from a people-group is a victorian/edwardian fantasy concocted by nationalists in order to reclaim said material, both for profit and for nationalism reasons. objectively speaking, someone or several someones composed that material & many of them were most likely women. the idea of claiming that folk music 'belongs' to all of 'us' (and 'us' at least in its original intention meaning white english people or white people of english extraction) because several generations of performers put their own spin on it is like saying the beatles' copyright really belongs to all of us because lennon & mccartney co wrote them. I'm not arguing for copyright law here but like the recognition of folksong ownership is completely broken in popular conception and it's v much a case of the idea that something belongs to 'everyone' is erasing the actual individuals/groups whose cultural property it is. (+ the living folk tradition regularly accepts new songs of known authorship, and operates a paradigm of collective ownership that is really ill served by the modern idea of intellectual property that can only make something a specific someone's or no one's at all)

so in THAT context, the girlbossification and uwuification of balladry by an outsider (who believes themselves to be an insider) is just kind of grotesque. firstly you're working from a canon which was selected and heavily modified by a victorian man to suit his delicate sensibilities, and then projecting like modern western feminist sensibilities on them. I've seen like 'feminist reworkings' of songs which lament women's helplessness, or exist for mothers to warn daughters about sexual assault. this is where the angela carter comparison comes in bc shes like the patron saint against the 'feminism is when women slay' school of folklore retelling and also someone who was both working really hard not to claim ownership of the stories she collected or to claim thematic ownership with her interpretations, but also writing her own 'folklore retellings' that actually comprehend and work with the deep themes at play rather than being like hm it's kind of problematic that the prince couldn't remember what cinderella looked like (fwiw most cinderella-esque stories are explicitly about the resourcefulness of the girl, and the prince - w his attached status+possessions - is literally just there to be her reward lol kind of a win for feminism idk..)

it's the belief that everyone in the past, especially if they were illiterate, was stupid. not to Survivals Theory but I recently saw this song from an irish traveller woman who claimed it was in the bible which everyone found funny but it literally heavily resembles a story from the apocryphal infancy gospel of thomas, which incidentally was extant as old irish poetry c.700 CE. like the anais mitchell girlies always have this approach that they're the first ones to recognise how great this repertoire is, or something. and her approach is very like oh I've discovered this lost hidden tradition etc although ironically she herself is part of a historic tradition of north americans ripping off martin carthy LOL 🤭

sorry this is like a huge thing for me and i kind of ran out of steam to get into it all but i appreciate the question n i hope at least some of that means something to you<3