This week I have chosen to sing a well known English Folk song, Scarborourgh Fair. It is about a real market (which were known as fairs) in the town of Scarborough in Yorkshire. It's likely that when it was written it would have had little or no accompaniment, apart from other voices. The ordinary people who probably wrote it, would have been very poor and wouldn't have been able to afford instruments. However, I decided to make up a piano accompaniment for the song as I'm lucky enough to have one.
Most British folk songs are about real things and real people. A good example would be a song such as 'The Gresford Disaster'. This is about a coal mine explosion in Wales. Many of these such songs were known as 'broadside ballads', because they were sold for a small amount of money on a broad sheet of paper. The money raised through broadsheet sales was then often donated to those who had lost a family member in the accident. It's thought that milkmaids used to learn these songs by heart to entertain themselves, whilst they were milking the cows (by hand on a tiny three legged stool) as some examples of broadsheets have been found underneath the white wash paint, pasted to the walls in old milking parlours.
The broadsheets were around during the industrial revolution and plentiful, due to the numerous accidents in the new factories and mines. This song however, is much earlier and it is thought to date from the middle ages. It's a song about a love affair that will never happen because the man instructs the woman to do the most impossible tasks. Examples are, making a shirt without using any thread, or reaping a harvest using a soft leather blade. It's almost as if he doesn't really want her to be his true love.
There are various theories about the strange lyrics of this song. The refrain keeps repeating the names of the herbs 'parsley sage rosemary and thyme'. These herbs were associated with death at that time...so was the man or the woman actually a deceased lover? Perhaps they were the ingredients for a love potion....It's a bit of a mystery.
