Thinking About the Words to Folks’ Songs

Lyrics in folk songs – defined as those ‘most folks are fond of singing’, to quote Phillips Barry (1939 – shape the mysterious processes by which a song can remain widely known as people hear it, re-create it, and keep it singing, sometimes for generations. I identify prevalent strategies in folk-song words – repetition and familiar imagery, rhetorical framings, parodic echoing and interjection, evocation of childhood and youth, voicing catastrophe and grief, formulaic (yet flexible) structural patterning, and call-and-response engagement – that enable people to carry songs onward and also to be carried by them, by creating shared identification, belonging, emotion, humor, participation, and more. Examples include ballads, lyric songs, and hymns from the U.S. Ozark mountains; a French children’s song; commercial 1960s and 1990s pop hits in English; disaster songs about a Pacific Northwest volcanic eruption, a Mississippi flood, an Oregon shipwreck, and a Spanish mine explosion; and Shona responsorial and improvising songs from Zimbabwe.