#lots of irish folk music

[fellow-nerd]

Thinking about how hozier is so Irish and Noah Kahan is so American ya know

[dummerjan]

i just came across ai covers on youtube and people are requesting songs in the comments instead of getting enraged and i am further losing hope in humanity and turning to misanthropy

[sunsoak]

My life is going to end soon if i don’t engage in some deeply community based experiences of human expression and love and music and food and creation with absolutely no irony or cynicism around it

[betty-bourgeoisie]

Okay, cus I know some of y'all are as fixated on folk music as I am - I could swear I've heard a recorded version of Air Fa La La Lo that's entirely in Irish (the version I'm remembering was also sung by a woman) but every recording I can find online has English lyrics? Does anyone have an all Irish version of this song?

[eggmeralda]

okay music question (feel free to still answer if you don't do all 3 of these): what style of music do you listen to most + what style do you enjoy seeing live + what style do you prefer to play, and are they all different or do they overlap?

[dullahandyke]

Have discovered a nook in which somebody has set up a rocking chair and a CD player and I was like grand job I can listen to my parents' CD collection :) and then i remembered what the CD collection looks like

[vulpixelates]

this song has me in near tears

[mx-flint]

WHYY is almost every single song a love song can't we sing about something else for a change???

[intheholler]

the appalachian murder ballad <3 one of the most interesting elements of americana and american folk, imo!

my wife recently gave me A Look when i had one playing in the car and she was like, "why do all of these old folk songs talk about killing people lmao" and i realized i wanted to Talk About It at length.

nerd shit under the cut, and it's long. y'all been warned

so, as y'all probably know, a lot of appalachian folk music grew its roots in scottish folk (and then was heavily influenced by Black folks once it arrived here, but that's a post for another time).

they existed, as most folk music does, to deliver a narrative--to pass on a story orally, especially in communities where literacy was not widespread. their whole purpose was to get the news out there about current events, and everyone loves a good murder mystery!

as an aside, i saw someone liken the murder ballad to a ye olde true crime podcast and tbh, yeah lol.

the "original" murder ballads started back across the pond as news stories printed on broadsheets and penned in such a way that it was easy to put to melody.

they were meant to be passed on and keep the people informed about the goings-on in town. i imagine that because these songs were left up to their original orators to get them going, this would be why we have sooo many variations of old folk songs.

naturally then, almost always, they were based on real events, either sung from an outside perspective, from the killer's perspective and in some cases, from the victim's. of course, like most things from days of yore, they reek of social dogshit. the particular flavor of dogshit of the OG murder ballad was misogyny.

so, the murder ballad came over when the english and scots-irish settlers did. in fact, a lot of the current murder ballads are still telling stories from centuries ago, and, as is the way of folk, getting rewritten and given new names and melodies and evolving into the modern recordings we hear today.

305 such scottish and english ballads were noted and collected into what is famously known as the Child Ballads collected by a professor named francis james child in the 19th century. they have been reshaped and covered and recorded a million and one times, as is the folk way.

while newer ones continued to largely fit the formula of retelling real events and murder trials (such as one of my favorite ones, little sadie, about a murderer getting chased through the carolinas to have justice handed down), they also evolved into sometimes fictional, (often unfortunately misogynistic) cautionary tales.

perhaps the most famous examples of these are omie wise and pretty polly where the woman's death almost feels justified as if it's her fault (big shocker).

but i digress. in this way, the evolution of the murder ballad came to serve a similar purpose as the spooky legends of appalachia did/do now.

(why do we have those urban legends and oral traditions warning yall out of the woods? to keep babies from gettin lost n dying in them. i know it's a fun tiktok trend rn to tell tale of spooky scary woods like there's really more haints out here than there are anywhere else, but that's a rant for another time too ain't it)

so, the aforementioned little sadie (also known as "bad lee brown" in some cases) was first recorded in the 1920s. i'm also plugging my favorite female-vocaist cover of it there because it's superior when a woman does it, sorry.

it is a pretty straightforward murder ballad in its content--in the original version, the guy kills a woman, a stranger or his girlfriend sometimes depending on who is covering it.

but instead of it being a cautionary 'be careful and don't get pregnant or it's your fault' tale like omie wise and pretty polly, the guy doesn't get away with it, and he's not portrayed as sympathetic like the murderer is in so many ballads.

a few decades after, women started saying fuck you and writing their own murder ballads.

in the 40s, the femme fatale trope was in full swing with women flipping the script and killing their male lovers for slights against them instead.

men began to enter the "find out" phase in these songs and paid up for being abusive partners. women regained their agency and humanity by actually giving themselves an active voice instead of just being essentially 'fridged in the ballads of old.

her majesty dolly parton even covered plenty of old ballads herself but then went on to write the bridge, telling the pregnant-woman-in-the-murder-ballad's side of things for once. love her.

as a listener, i realized that i personally prefer these modern covers of appalachian murder ballads sung by women-led acts like dolly and gillian welch and even the super-recent crooked still especially, because there is a sense of reclamation, subverting its roots by giving it a woman's voice instead.

meaning that, like a lot else from the problematic past, the appalachian murder ballad is something to be enjoyed with critical ears. violence against women is an evergreen issue, of course, and you're going to encounter a lot of that in this branch of historical music.

but with folk songs, and especially the murder ballad, being such a foundational element of appalachian history and culture and fitting squarely into the appalachian gothic, i still find them important and so, so interesting

i do feel it's worth mentioning that there are "tamer" ones. with traditional and modern murder ballads alike, some of them are just for "fun," like a murder mystery novel is enjoyable to read; not all have a message or retell a historical trial.

(for instance, i'd even argue ultra-modern, popular americana songs like hell's comin' with me is a contemporary americana murder ballad--being sung by a male vocalist and having evolved from being at the expense of a woman to instead being directed at a harmful and corrupt church. that kind of thing)

in short: it continues to evolve, and i continue to eat that shit up.

anyway, to leave off, lemme share with yall my personal favorite murder ballad which fits squarely into murder mystery/horror novel territory imo.

it's the 10th child ballad and was originally known as "the twa sisters." it's been covered to hell n back and named and renamed.

but! if you listen to any flavor of americana, chances are high you already know it; popular names are "the dreadful wind and rain" and sometimes just "wind and rain."

in it, a jealous older sister pushes her other sister into a river (or stream, or sea, depending on who's covering it) over a dumbass man. the little sister's body floats away and a fiddle maker come upon her and took parts of her body to make a fiddle of his own. the only song the new fiddle plays is the tale about how it came to be, and it is the same song you have been listening to until then.

how's that for genuinely spooky-scary appalachia, y'all?

[night-dark-woods]

ID. the album cover for The Book of Secrets, which has a heavily filtered photo of the artist standing in an arched doorway. End ID.

[bittershins]

the production on Joshua Burnside's work never stops being interesting, and i love teasing apart all of the different elements across an album

[jokeroutsubs]

[📝ENG TRANSLATION] The coolest guys in the Balkans: We hung out with the Slovenian sensation Joker Out ahead of their new tour

Original article written by Kata Biloš for Journal Man, published 15.11.2024. Photos by Martina Movrić. English translation by @moonlvster, review by IG marija_rocen, IG irenalemajic, proofread by @flowerlotus8

Full article under the cut 👇

Since they went to Eurovision last year with the song 'Carpe Diem', the Slovenian band Joker Out's continued success hasn't stopped. They've gained a large fanbase, performed in various European cities, and now they're going on a regional tour too. Bojan Cvjetićanin, Kris Guštin, Jure Maček, Nace Jordan and Jan Peteh are our man crushes this month. The tour is accompanied by the release of their new album - 'Souvenir Pop'. Not even we could resist their charm so we hung out with them at a special photoshoot.

The region was missing a band that has an irresistible sense of style, infectious songs and an even more infectious charisma. Besides that, they're not afraid to be themselves and talk about their feelings, and since we celebrate Movember every November on this portal, we couldn't miss the opportunity to host Joker Out in our Journal Men section. Here's everything they revealed to us.

You recently released your new song - 'Bluza'. You recorded the music video with Buč Kesidi, how did that collaboration come about and what was the shoot like?

We already played the song 'Bluza' on our European tour and it was very well received by the audience, so we decided it should be a single. When the idea for the music video came about we knew we wanted that kind of 'kafana' atmosphere. And when we were thinking about someone who could smash a bottle on Bojan's head, Zoki from Buč Kesidi immediately came to mind, and Luka is, as we saw, a perfect waiter too. So it came together that our two bands are both active in the region, and the visual component matched too.

The new song will be on your upcoming album. Could you reveal a little bit of what we can expect?

The album will be called 'Souvenir Pop'. It represents everything that happened to us since the beginning of our Eurovision journey up until now. That was a very interesting period for us, a lot of things changed, our lives kind of turned around by 180 degrees a couple of times and we had to pour all those experiences and feelings into something. In the end, we came to the conclusion that the songs are completely different and there's no common thread between them, but that's exactly why they feel like memories from various places and people and they remind us of various smells and tastes. So it's a very interesting album which is actually like a magnet that we brought home from a trip.

We mentioned Buč Kesidi. You're often compared to them and we read somewhere that they're one of your idols. When you were just starting out as a band, did you have the same idols or have your tastes in music always been so different?

We had a few of the same idols, which are more or less Slovenian bands - Siddharta, Big Foot Mama and Dan D. As for international music, we're mostly into the Beatles, ABBA and Arctic Monkeys... Otherwise we come from quite different musical roots. Jan is more into metal, Kris listened to a lot of hip-hop, Jure listened to a lot of Irish folk music, and Nace and Bojan listened to - everything!

You have a concert in Zagreb soon. We know it's hard to pick your favourite audience, but what sets the Zagreb audience apart from others?

The Zagreb audience is specific because when we had our first concert there (which was our first concert in Croatia as well), we were the most open-minded. The first time we played in Zagreb was at Šalata with Buč Kesidi and we had no idea what to expect and what the audience's reaction would be like. And the reaction was phenomenal. Because of that specific concert, we decided to perform at Tvornica Kulture. So we could say that the Zagreb audience created that shock effect for us and really turned around our perception of how people here see us and how we see them. We love the Zagreb audience a lot.

Since it's November right now, we're celebrating Movember. You have a song which talks about anxiety. How important and difficult or easy is it to show those emotions through music, as a man?

We think that day by day it's more accepted that people generally talk about their feelings and more difficult mental states. Society has started accepting that we aren't constantly cheerful and smiling and that's how it should be, because it's not in human nature to constantly be happy. We've never seen that as a taboo and we never had problems sharing our emotions with other people. Maybe that's the reason why it was a little easier to write about it.

The truth is that the song started taking shape in my head in English, which is maybe a sign that we had to dig into our subconcious to open up in that sense. But we still enjoy how different languages represent our different sides.

To end things off, what will you do after the tour? Are you going on a well-deserved holiday?

Yes! We're actually we're going on a real holiday for the first time. We're taking January and February off and that'll be the first time in two or three years that we don't have to think about our next song or project while on holiday. We can't wait! Our brains are a little fried, which is quite normal in this business, and we were fed up with ourselves, the other band members, and the noise and everything. We still absolutely enjoy everything, but like any normal person, we need rest too and we're really happy that we will get some rest.

Joker Out starts their regional tour on the 22nd of November in Ljubljana, and they're coming to Zagreb, to Tvornica Kulture, on the 3rd of December. Which other cities will they go to, but also a bit of the atmosphere from our photoshoot, can be found in the video below.

And in the end we leave you with Joker Out's new album - Souvenir Pop!

Thank you to the restaurant Mek Per's for letting us shoot at their location.

[canmom]

I think Farya Faraji has realised that hour long videos about the difference between actual historical music and modern historically themed music is a great way to get people to watch stuff about music theory. Which, you know, guilty, I haven't watched his older videos on medieval music yet but I did watch this one!

Anyway it's fascinating stuff - I didn't realise how new our current approach to tonal harmony is. I tried to be careful to distinguish between the general and the culture specific in my music theory posts, but even in my own culture, it turns out I was picking out emphases that are very modern. If Farya is right, medieval European music actually sounded a lot more like the 'modal' approach that still exists in middle Eastern, Balkan and Mediterranean music. Instead of supporting a melody with chords, you would improvisationally add various kinds of what modern Western music calls ornamentation. Towards the end of the middle ages you'd get a greater degree of polyphony using e.g. a sustained drone note or additional melodies that don't really try to harmonise in the way we write them to today. At this point the level of ornamentation dies down, and it lays the groundwork for the modern system of harmony to appear in the early modern period.

In contrast to actual historically informed music, Farya describes a genre he calls 'bardcore', which aims for a superficial appearance of medieval style to modern ears but uses a modern folk-inspired performance style - strummed chords, modern classically trained singing styles, modern instruments like the Irish bouzouki invented in the 70s. (As with the viking music and orientalism videos, he's at some pains to emphasise that anachronistic music isn't bad music and he likes a lot of these 'bardcore' bands.)

Anyway, I appreciate it because it expands my horizon for 'ways music can work' and gives a narrative to the evolution of tonal harmony - maybe an oversimplified narrative, and I'm still not entirely sure what the term 'modal' is getting at (presumably something to do with the modes [roughly, scales] that music was written and embellished in?), but it's a starting point. one of the most interesting youtubers to come along recently...

[finleycannotdraw]

can u recommend some bands? i think i like ur music taste and i am terrible at finding music

ty :)

of COURSE I can <3 you’ve probably heard of some of these, but maybe there’ll be some you haven’t! I don’t know what you already like, so… here we go :)

Hozier. Yeah this was always going to be first on the list I’m currently listening to basically nothing else! He’s an Irish folk/soul/blues/etc idk musician who uses a lot of religious and mythological themes in his lyrics and has a lot of songs that include social justice commentary.

The Amazing Devil is a folk rock band with an incredibly unique sound. Their songs are incredibly emotional and have an awesome fantasy vibe going on—plus there’s two singers, and they often sing independently from each other, which is something you don’t see often!

Good Morning Bedlam is a bluegrass band that I’ve gotten into recently! They’re sort of like… a mix of the amazing devil and the crane wives?

The Crane Wives, while we’re at it, and

The Oh Hellos. they’re fairly similar and I don’t have a ton to say about their stylistic differences, but they’re all definitely worth checking out!

Florence & The Machine. Most people have heard of them but I always like to recommend them anyway

Alec Benjamin, if you’re into softer indie music! He has a lot of different styles of lyrics, but his voice is consistent, so he’s great to listen to if you’re looking for that sort of variety.

Chxrlotte doesn’t have a lot of music out, but I’m a big fan of the music she has released, including the ones about Good Omens! The others are more angsty which I love too.

The Family Crest is an orchestral indie pop rock band, which blows my mind. I can’t believe orchestra isn’t a more utilized tool in popular lyrical music, because they do it so well.

Good Kid is actually my brother’s favorite band, and I love them too. They’re also indie rock, but they have a very distinctive style and are easy to get into! Plus they haven’t released a shit ton of songs like some other artists, so it isn’t overwhelming to explore their discography.

Jonatha Brooke is an artist I only know about because my mom liked her music a lot in the 90s, but she’s got a super nice voice and has some awesomely relatable lyrics. I especially recommend her album Ten Cent Wings!

Midlake is a super melodic folk rock band. I’m obsessed with their album The Courage of Others, which has a melancholy vibe that’s super easy to get lost in.

Palaye Royale is harder rock than anyone else on the list so far, but they’ve got an awesome style. Unique voice and definitely darker themes in their lyrics.

Tears for Fears is a pop rock band that I love because my dad does. (My parents are musicians—I trust their music taste).

Toad the Wet Sprocket got their name from Monty Python, but PLEASE go listen to the Architect of the Ruin EP. You will not regret it. Also the song Something’s Always Wrong is like… entrenched in my very being.

Elbow is a band that I never see in fandom circles, but they’re definitely not obscure. Check out their album Little Fictions! They’re kind of like Midlake.

Will Wood ranges from chaotic and fun (The Normal Album) to absolutely soul-crushing (in case I make it)! Sometimes even both at the same time!

(I would’ve also put Paramore, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and other rock/pop punk bands I like on there, but I assumed you already know them.) (If you were looking for harder rock or metal, let me know, because this list is not that.)

If you want more genre-specific recs or even album/song recs, don’t hesitate to ask!! Music is the fuel of my soul.

[sirfrogsworth]

So... my old high school is in the news.

And, of course, Twitter is handling this tragic circumstance about like you'd expect.

If you look at the young girl's GoFundMe, you can see white folks are being very normal about all of this.

Except if you watch the video, the fight was between two groups of students and 90% of that fighting was between Black students.

Oh, and the video above from "Salty Irish Girl" is 25 seconds long.

But in other places it is 28 seconds long.

Do you want to guess what was in that missing 3 seconds?

Young Kaylee starting the fight and throwing the first punch.

This was not a "Black on White fight" as described. It was a bunch of teenagers fighting another bunch of teenagers and one of them took it way too far and used the pavement as a weapon.

Sadly I saw many fights in my days at this school. Usually over petty things. A lot of the students were poor and hungry and had no outlets to help them cope. If you couldn't play a sport you were just neglected by the school. And so a lot of these kids pretended to be in gangs despite those gangs not really existing in our area and they would fight each other for wearing red or blue.

The first thing to go in poor school districts are extracurricular activities. When I went to East, we were lucky to have some choices, but our class size was so large it was impossible to include everyone. But those programs keep dwindling as budgets continue to get cut. Music and art programs. AV club. Choir. Sports only survive because they can monetize it. These kids need enough food in their bellies and something to do besides homework.

[hetalia-club]

Genuine question! I don't mean this rude but does the US have folk songs? I just didn't know since it was such a newer country.

Yes. I'm pretty sure every country has folk music regardless of the newness of their country. You'll notice a lot of them have heavy Irish influences for obvious reasons. But yes this would considered 'cowboy music' songs they would sing whilst around a fire. Think Red Dead. Those are all real songs too. Here are a few but there are honestly hundreds.

This one has BIIIIIIG Irish Energy. Also It sounds best if you sing it in an Irish accent like these guys are. Because that's honestly most likely what it was like.

So this song. Not a lot of people know the origins or what the words really mean. This song was original The jig of the British Army and the Brits started calling the Americans Yankees, as we know. Then the Americans stole the song. So the line, "Stuck a feather in his cap and called it Maccaroni" Maccaroni was 1700's slang for 'cool' so if something was Macaroni it was rad as hell. So the Brits were mocking the Americans for putting feathers in their hats saying "You guys thing you look so cool but you actually just look dumb. Also you're always fucking all the time. You're poor. Your guns are old. So ha!"

So when the Americans started to win the war and push the Brits back the Americans started to sing the song back to the Brits giving it a whole new meaning. Which was once a diss track became a double diss track. It turned it into "You're right we do actually look sick as hell with our feathers in our hats thanks for noticing." And so on. Americans are so unserious, always have been.

Prussia & America when the Brits dropped this song. Brittan really popped off with this one not gonna lie. Still slaps unironically.

I would also like to note that Americans Also have Sea Shanties.

About the American-Mexico war. This song goes so hard.

First recording was a whaling ship that was leaving New London, Connecticut. Again, it's sang best with an Irish accent because that is most likely as it was preformed. It's also sang to the tune of an existing Irish folk song.

These are two I know off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many more.