'tis coolbut a bit gay innit
Sung by a bloke
"My love's in Germany send him home, send him home"
NuFolk would have it:
"My Bruv's in Germany ... etc, ... etc"
Kicks off for me briefly at 5.11
Can you recognise your Dad's voice?
I always think that's the great thing about folk music though: traditional songs don't care about gender.
In fact loads of folk songs switch subject (and back again) throughout the song. For instance the song starts with a male narrator telling of how he overheard a woman bemoaning her lot, about how her male lover left her. The song will suddenly switch into "I": it's now "he left me" etc. Folk songs do this and don't care what gender you started with.
That's not to say that a singer in 2010 isn't obviously gonna be aware of the queer implications. Particularly when so many songs use the word 'gay', in its original etymological sense.
all in all, it means you can have your cake and eat it as a song interpreter: you can sing a song that switches character and simply ignore it, or you can allude to it without actually claiming the narrator's voice as your own, or you can kind of slip between both. Fitting, then, for today's (thankfully) more mature gender politics.
The "nowt so queer as folk" all-dayer at Cecil Sharp House recently made this kind of conversation very pertinent (and also redundant) Yay
But even ignoring gender questions, folksongs fuck with the perspectives of the narrator and what is being narrated constantly. It's dream logic. Traumwerk.
