Historically, most world music wasn’t written down. Indeed many folks believe that once a traditional tune gets written down it’s effectively dead. Like a bug frozen in amber it can no longer evolve. It runs the risk of becoming a museum piece — a dusty page on a library shelf.
The process of oral transmission is what has made the music so adaptable. But it has also made the music vulnerable to being lost forever. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the social upheavals of mass migration, war, famine, increasing urbanisation and new technology almost wiped out traditional music. By the end of WWII, in some parts of the world there was almost no traditional music left ‘in the wild’.
This is exactly what has happened in Jussi’s homeland of Karelia. In the early 20th century the rune song tradition was still alive in remote villages, with the old songs a regular part of daily communal life. But in WWII Karelia became a battle ground between Finland and the USSR. Karelia was carved up by the two countries, and suffered massive social upheavals which resulted in the loss of many aspects of traditional life. In the post-war years, Karelian culture and language was actively suppressed in Russia under Stalin's leadership. For many years a few vestiges of the old ways clung on in remote villages, but now Jussi Huovinen is the last remaining individual with a significant first-hand knowledge of the musical traditions of Karelia.
Fortunately the rune song tradition has been collected and documented by Elias Lönnrot and others, and the staff at the Juminkeko Centre continue to record Jussi's repertoire for future posterity.
In the meantime, musicians such as Myllärit, Hedningarna, Kimmo Pohjonen, and most notably Värttinä are reviving Karelian music from old recordings and transcriptions and taking it to a new young, urban audience. In this way a dying tradition is being re-born.
This process of decline, collection, preservation and revival has been all over the world in last 100 years. A dedicated breed of musicians known as ‘folk song collectors’ have undertaken the arduous task of travelling to remote villages to find old singers and musicians who still remember the traditional tunes and songs. The collectors would then write these songs down, or, in more recent years, record them. Apart from Elias Lönnrot, some of the big names among folk song collectors include:
- Alan Lomax (an American musicologist)
- Percy Grainger (Australian-born classical composer)
- Ralph Vaughan Williams (English classical composer)
- Béla Bartók (Hungarian classical composer)
- Zoltán Kodály (Hungarian classical composer)
- Woody Guthrie (American folk singer)
- Pete Seeger (American folk singer)
- Francis James Child (American academic)
- AL Lloyd (English/Australian folk singer)
- Jean Ritchie (Jean is an American folk singer who was originally one of Alan Lomax’s sources who caught the collecting bug herself)
- Cecil Sharpe (composer and ‘father of the English folk revival’)
The folk song collecting movement takes songs which are about disappear from the oral tradition, and preserves them in archives. Wherever this is taking place, there is also a parallel folk song revival movement. This is where musicians take songs out of the archives and inject them back into the living oral tradition. Many songs that were once well-known but dropped out of circulation during the mid-20th century have become well known again in recent years. This is often thanks to recording and broadcasting technologies that have meant that songs can be transmitted without having to rely on the oral traditions that probably function best in a settled village environment.
A well known example of this is the song Scarborough Fair which had all but left the oral tradition by the 1960s when Martin Carthy started performing a version of the song based loosely on a version collected in the town of Whitby by Frank Kitson in the late 19th century. He taught his version of the song to Paul Simon who added some more of his own musical ideas and released it as a single which became an international hit after it was featured on the soundtrack of The Graduate in 1968. It is now one of the best known of all English folk songs, and is probably known by most English-speaking people.
These days the folk movement draws a distinction between ‘source singers’ like Jussi — singers who have grown up within the tradition and learnt the material orally — and ‘revival singers’ like Martin Carthy. This distinction is now becoming blurred as the revival takes hold, and a second and third generation of musicians are growing up ‘within the tradition’ — once again learning the old songs from their parents and grand-parents.
→ Hotline to the Ancestors — the story of Martin Carthy and second-generation revival singer Eliza Carthy, and Digital Gothic — an example of a band reviving old Swedish music from archival sources.
