At 02:45 PM 8/7/2002 -0700, Ed Cray wrote:
>In Seeger's original three-stanza version, it is NOT a circular song. As
>he explains it, Joe Hickerson, late of the Archive of American Folk
>Culture and then the leader of the Oberlin Folk Song Club, added the two
>verses that bring the song in circular fashion almost to the beginning:
>
>Where have all the soldiers gone/Long time passing.
>Where have all the soldiers gone/Long time ago.
>Where have all the soldiers gone/Gone to graveyards, every one.
>When will they ever learn? (2)
>
>Where have all the graveyards gone, etc.
>Covered with flowers everyone.
AHA! So it wasn't based on a circular song. (I did know about the "Don"
connection, and hesitated to use that example, fearing to start an All the
Flowers string, which it turns out I have done.)
But my point is that an idea for a kind of song is abstract. One might get
that idea from hearing a particular song, and then create another
song. But it would be impossible a thousand years later for us to know
which song gave the creator the idea. And there can be many, many songs
that use a particular idea, such as bringing the song around so that it can
start all over again, or counting from one to twelve, or going from A to
Zed or Omega or whatever is the relevant last letter, or using the letters
of a term or name to structure the song, or having the boy say something,
then the girl answers, then the boy answers, then the girl answers,
etc.. Now, many hundred years (if not thousands) later, it is impossible
to assert that one of those songs is derived from another, relying on that
basic similarity of abstract idea. It IS, in some few cases, possible to
trace connections when intermediate texts have survived. That's why
scholars are grateful to collectors and archivists (and the digital tradition).
Postea tacebo.
-- Bill
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