As I child, I’ve mentioned before, Mom played music for me all the time. She used to sing too, and one of the songs I remember was an old folk song about the sinking of the Titanic that was called, give or take, “It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down”. I barely remember the tune, and the lyrics were fragmented in my mind, but I typed what I knew into Google, and what do you know? It came up! Apparently, it was written in the years following the disaster, and has been covered by countless artists, most notably country legend Roy Acuff and folk hero Woody Guthrie. I looked up the lyrics in half a dozen lyric websites, most of which were contributed by ordinary folks interpreting the words from old recordings, or just the way I remembered them from my own mother singing thirty years ago. None of the variations were like the way I remembered it. All of them were similar, but the same structure and content prevailed through all of them. Apparently, it’s a common Boy Scouts of America campfire song. I’ve been in Scouting most of my life, and the most common campfire song I know is “The Grand Old Duke Of York”. It’s rarely sung differently, yet it’s almost four hundred years old (I looked that song up while I was at it). Maybe the simplicity of “York” made it easier to pass down. Makes you wonder how First Nations legends have made it after so many generations. I’ll speak more on this a little later.
I once took a course in university about Maritime History, and the professor, whom I admire for his unique perspective of his material and his frank appraisals, taught us about folk art and culture, particularly in the Maritimes. He had a real disdain for ‘folk art’, the kind of tossed-off trinkets you buy at farmer’s markets and gift shops. He felt that folk art in that sense was too contrived, and that it drew culture away from its real essence, which is the whole of a group of people’s lifestyles and traditions that give them a collective identity. He saw folk art as cookie-cutter craft work designed primarily as a source of income for an otherwise financially drained society. He once told us that the rocks down at Peggy’s Cove were actually painted white so that from a distance, tourists would see them as more shiny and spectacular than their natural, dull grey. That notion blew my mind. Why on earth would anyone feel the need to paint rocks? There’s a guy who lives near my place who painted a big rock in his yard to look like a giant frog. It looks awful.
It’s true; folk art can indeed be tedious. Doomed to be stored in garages, tossed thoughtlessly in landfills, displayed at yard sales with 25₵ stickers tacked on, these hand crafted, often toll-painted little talismans could be wooden, ceramic, with or without slogans or cheesy one-liners, mass-produced or even knitted by someone’s great aunt. Usually they have some sort of cultural significance, like a 3D postcard that you don’t have to mail to anyone. It will make a great conversation piece for about ten minutes when you put it on a mantle or window sill at when you get home. Then you end up cursing it every time you have to dust around it, before you or someone who inherits your house finally gets rid of it. If it’s wooden, you can at least burn it. Otherwise, it has been utterly useless, and was just as likely forgotten by the crafts person who made it.
In that sense, folk art doesn’t seem to have much purpose other than to occupy the artist for a while, and to rip off some sentimental tourist of their scant spending money. We need to ask ourselves something really important. What is ‘folk’? Is it music, like Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, or acoustic guitar music in general sang by knit-cap-wearing hipsters in coffee shops? Is it tradition? Is it literature? Is it crafts? Folk, in its most literal sense, means ‘the people’. Folk music, therefore, is music of the people, whoever the ‘people’ in question are. What the lyrical subject matter is may be irrelevant, since instrumental reels and jigs are still folk in the Celtic traditions. It’s no less folk whether it’s a song about the Titanic sinking or the tale of a drunken revelry at Finnegan’s wake. Either way, it’s a tale designed to pass something on. That ‘something’ can be historical or fictional, but the story is the whole point. The details fall the wayside like chipped corners of ceramic figures and paint flecks off ‘wish you were here’ wooden lighthouses. The artifacts themselves might pass down, from generation to generation, and like anything old, might one day prove valuable to someone. The artifacts slowly deteriorate, fade, and lose their significance when the story of their purchase goes to the grave with the original buyer.
One summer day, when my family was camping at Murray Beach, I was walking along the rocky cliff where kids and adults alike love to hop from rock to rock, wading out into the choppy surf and carve their names into the plateau of shale and sandstone. Some kids visiting from the United States asked me on this particular day why there was a long, rusty-red trail run down the rock face. The truth is it is a large clay deposit above that slowly eroded down in a trickling pattern, giving it an eerie bleeding aesthetic. I told them that the legend says that a young teenager once boasted that he could climb the rock face, only to tragically fall to his untimely demise, and that his blood has stained the rock face ever since. The kids just stood there in awe. They ran off to tell their families, and while I wasn’t around to see it, they probably came back and showed them the scene of that fateful incident and its gruesome legacy. Now, some of you might say that wasn’t a very nice thing to do. I deliberately made up a story, passed it off as true, and now there’s no telling if more people have heard about the Great Bleeding Rock folk tale. Who can say how the story has changed as it passes from one pair of lips to another ear, like the old telephone game we all played in preschool? How could I pass something off as true?
Therein lies the great dilemma in folk tradition. You could just as easily ask yourself what ‘truth’ is as much as ‘folk’. What is true? I often use Wikipedia as a source of information, but people say you can’t trust it. Why not? Should I trust a text book instead? Books once said the Earth was flat, that Columbus discovered America, and homosexuality was a disorder. We don’t believe any of that now. The fact is, people write books, and people also write what goes on the internet. Wikipedia is interesting, because anyone can contribute to it. I could write up an entry about the Great Bleeding Rock, and many people would take it at face value. Hold on: before you get too worried, remember that I am an academic at heart, and I value academic integrity very much. I’m teaching my students how to site their research as of this writing because I think it’s important to acknowledge the academic effort to write what is ‘true’. Truth, however, is temporary. It is also the sworn enemy of the imagination, which creates for someone like me--an academic who loves to write fiction—a great paradox. Does something become true by default after enough time elapses, or is it the other way around? The great telephone game doesn’t have to end in a circle; it can keep going indefinitely. When it finally comes to an end, the message goes to the grave with the last person, unless they start the message again. That’s why we don’t know if King Arthur ever ruled Camelot, whether Atlantis ever existed, whether Jesus actually rose from the dead, or whether Helen lived and loved at Troy. Who’s to say someone like me just made it all up?
One final thought about folk and truth. What does it matter? Hundreds of years from now, if twentieth century films survive, will people believe that Jack and Rose fell in love on the Titanic as the film story goes? The real story of Titanic is rather depressing. A large boat hit an iceberg, sank within hours in the icy North Atlantic Ocean, and people died horrible deaths. There are no romances to be told here. Where’s the fun in that? Traditions survive if they are exciting, personal, intense, or if they provide some moral lesson to be passed on. Titanic’s story was one of humanity’s arrogance, not unlike the Tower of Babel. I wonder if people actually built a tower like that? If the Titanic movie is any indication, most stories are based in a grain of truth somewhere, depending of course on what you hold to be true. All stories trickle down the blood lines; sometimes the stories bleed clay rather than blood. For all I know, someone might very well have fallen on the cliffs at Murray Beach. If nothing else, I entertained some kids, and gave them a neat folk legend to pass on. No harm has come to anyone. At least I didn’t paint the rocks white.
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