This volume represents a selection of papers delivered at a colloquium on laments sponsored by the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), The Australian National University (ANU), the National Folklore Conference (NFC) and the National Folk Festival (NFF) on 20–22 April 2011. Analysis of the corpus reveals a heterogeneous collection of songs on a wide range of themes, but with certain genres predominating, notably hunting songs and songs in dialect - songs which, like ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel’, have been mobilised to reinforce ideas of regional identity and pride over many years. From this narrative the main themes of the thesis are drawn out: the problem of defining ‘folk song’, given its eclectic nature the role of the various collectors, mediators and performers of folk songs over the years, including myself the range of different contexts in which the songs have been performed, and by whom the vexed questions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘invented tradition’, and the extent to which this repertoire is a distinctive regional one. The thesis begins with the history of the best-known Cumbrian folk song, ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel’ from its date of composition around 1830 through to the late twentieth century. The principal task has been to research and present the folk songs known to have been published or performed in Cumbria since circa 1900, designated as the Cumbrian Folk Song Corpus: a body of 515 songs from 1010 different sources, including manuscripts, print, recordings and broadcasts. Although primarily a social history of popular culture, with some elements of ethnography and a little musicology, it is also a participant-observer study from the personal perspective of one who has performed and collected Cumbrian folk songs for some forty years. This thesis endeavours to address this gap in knowledge in a small way, through a study of Cumbrian folk song and its performance over the past two hundred years. One of the lacunae of traditional music scholarship in England has been the lack of systematic study of folk song and its performance in discrete geographical areas. We conclude that ‘authenticity’ is a dialogic concept, which becomes ‘in-authentic,’ as soon as its parameters become static. In the second part, we demonstrate how these insights work in practice with a case study of a folk song complex called Where Are You Going To, Fair Maid? with Roud number 298. We do so by introducing a concept of multiple authenticities, based on notions by Denis Dutton and Regina Bendix.

In this chapter we discuss folk songs both as artefacts and in performance and evaluate how the concept of ‘authenticity’ changes according to these perspectives. as artefacts, while on the other hand, they also come to life the moment they are being sung, i.e. In folk songs, the matter is further complicated by the fact that, on the one hand, they can be referred to as objects collected on paper or sound-recordings, i.e. full text: Īuthenticity is a multi-layered and highly elusive concept, which seems to change its significance when it is applied to an object, a statement or a situation. Reading Song Lyrics demonstrates how and why song lyrics matter as a paradigmatic art form in the culture of modernity. Probing into the relationship between lyrics and the ambivalent performance of national culture in Britain, it offers exemplary readings of a highly subversive 1597 ayre by John Dowland, of an 1811 broadside ballad about Sara Baartman, ‘The Hottentot Venus’, and of a 2000 song by ‘jungle punk’ collective Asian Dub Foundation. The second part then offers three extended case studies which showcase the larger cultural and historical viability of this model. It outlines theoretical approaches to issues such as performance and performativity, generic convention and cultural capital, sound and songfulness, mediality and musical multimedia, and step by step applies them to the example of a single song. The first part of this book accordingly introduces a thoroughly transdisciplinary interpretive framework. It takes lyrics seriously as a complex form of verbal art that has been unjustly neglected in literary, music, and, to a lesser degree, cultural studies, partly as it cuts squarely across institutional boundaries. Reading Song Lyrics offers the first systematic introduction to lyrics as a vibrant genre of (performed) literature.

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