I asked Alexa to play "Wild Mountain Thyme," and she chose a version by the Chieftains, an Irish group. She went on to play "similar" music, and she is told to do. The next six songs were all Irish folk songs, not Scottish. If you ask for Scottish music, you get bagpipes, mostly marches. It is curious now that the Scots and the Irish play up their cultural similarity now - except in Northern Ireland.
Scottish folk music has some rebellious tunes, about being oppressed by the English and fighting them. But the Irish simply have many more, in and amongst the songs about "The girl I left behind" and "Isn't Ireland a beautiful place." The Irish also have songs about being oppressed by the Scots and fighting them, right there at home. Such songs appeal to leftists, such as the Foggy Foggy Dew. Whether they are fighting the English or the Scots-Irish is conveniently flexible.
The Irish have lots of these songs and get much more sympathy worldwide than the Northern Ireland Protestants.
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
GK Chesterton "The Ballad of the White Horse"
If the Batistas had great songs in Cuba, they never made it to the US. Pete Seeger and other folkies picked up Guantanamera and made it a Castro song masquerading as a peace song.
Seeger was especially good at transforming folk songs into political statements. All parties in Europe tried to do that, but the communists tended to be better at it, and in the Anglosphere it was no contest. I link to Tom Lehrer's Folk Song Army from time to time, which makes fun of the shallow but noisy support for peace and justice, but the left just had better political songs throughout the 60s, and more of them. Draft Sighing for peace is a good, reliable gig.
English miners had Blackleg Miner, The Bells of Rhymney, and a dozen other songs. Mine owners don't write songs, I guess. Where would they play them? At the local pub?
3 comments:
Here's a very unusual protest song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSFZOvLrueY
Good memory. You linked to PF Sloan and I posted on him 6 years ago. Sponge-Headed Scienceman mentioned that he had written Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction."
You can get an AI to do a very focused song list, though you'll have to set up the list yourself in your player. The advantage is that it knows, with coaching, how to distinguish between Scots and Irish, and even how to stick to a particular style, protest or otherwise, sad, romantic, funny, angry, whatever. It can even be taught a preferred musical style. Grok informs me that the style I'm usually drawn to is Phrygian.
At Project Gutenberg I'm working on Bailey's Dictionary, nearly 300 years old. The editor is much given to using adages that were old-fashioned even then, and in several languages, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, German, Old German, even Saxon. The German (and Dutch etc.) adages are given in Fraktur typeface, while the Saxon ones are in a peculiar Saxon script that's about 2/3 ordinary English and 1/3 really wild. Grok is incredibly helpful in sorting out the often nearly unintelligible scans that result, especially when the original is blurry or defaced in spots. Apparently Grok speaks Greek, Latin, even Saxon, and can translate all the archaic adages and make good guesses about what character probably was meant. I suppose at some point we'll start using better OCS software that's AI-enabled.
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