Categories: uncategorized
Date: 19 June 2006 09:05:05
Discussing folk music whilst on a ramble the other day, appropriately enough with Ramblin' Folkie. And we started talking about death songs.
Lots of traditional folk music involves death. In fact, it's one of the three main categories of folk song:
- The ‘meet a pretty fair maid' song, which usually culminates in a trip to the woods
- The ghost song, frequently involving the ghost of the pretty fair maid.
- The death song
But anyway, death songs. I love them so much. As a subject for a song, it's gone badly out of fashion. Popular culture can't face it, and our lack of faith as a society means that the truths we once held in common concerning the life to come are personalised and privatised.
The result? We don't know how to face death, and we can't celebrate it. Materialistic lives and values means that we have feathered our own nest, and feel we have no need of a better life to come. Traditional folk music comes from people whose only hope of a better life was death. Consider some of the words:
‘Some glad morning, when this life is over, I'll fly away
To my home on God's celestial shore, I'll fly away.'
‘I rest in the hope that, one fine day,
Sunlight will burst through these prisons of clay
And old Gabriel's trumpet, and the voice of the Lord
Shall wake up the dead in the old churchyard.'
‘I am a poor wayfaring stranger,
A-travelling through this world of woe
Yet there's no sickness, toil or danger
In that bright world to which I go....
I'm going there to see my saviour
To sing his praise forever more
I'm only going over Jordan
I'm only going over home.'
I find all of these help me to get life in perspective. I don't need to build heaven for myself here on earth, as heaven is a sure hope to come. When I feel pain on earth, either my own or someone else's, I know that I'm a stranger here, but I will go home.