[robotmay]

I'm an English folk musician and it's perhaps surprising to many people, considering the prevalence of English and our modern music, that we as a country have lost a huge amount of our songs and music over the years. We have however re-entered a folk revival since the 70s and it has combined with the national pastime of peculiar hobbiests having documented a lot of really obscure things.

But anyway, my partner sings one of our oldest documented songs, which I would classify as fairly unknown outside of historical circles and in an older form of English that is quite tricky to decipher: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr2LRpx4Uyk

I learn quite a few tunes and songs from various countries and it's interesting as to which I find immediately feel familiar to me. Scandinavian, French, Belgian, Breton, Quebecois stuff etc is very popular in folk circles here in the UK and I both listen and play a lot of it. Though a lot of us might struggle to sing along you might be surprised at how far some traditional songs travel :D

[sgroppino]

Quebecois stuff... this one is great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyNYrmmdUd4 :)

[robotmay]

Ooh thanks, haven't come across them before. I'm a big fan of Le Vent du Nord and Le Freres Brunet, but I really want to expand my album collection further. The one disappointing thing with the Quebecois folk scene is that they're so slow to digitise their albums and sell them on Bandcamp!

[robotmay]

These days I live in Wales and there's one band here I really quite like who sing in both Welsh and English: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xnLAg_O0NJA

[angrais]

Daft question: how do we know if the pronunciation is correct in the song your partner is singing? Given its in an older form of English and English is not well known for being spoken as you read it (like Latin).

[robotmay]

Good question! I'm not super knowledgeable about it myself. I think anything from that far back is likely to be a reasonable amount of guesswork, but there are often some indicators as to how things are pronounced. A good one I've seen before is looking at rhymes; if it's likely that two words were intended to rhyme in a song/poem etc it can help indicate some pronunciation. I've seen this used for Shakespeare original pronunciation studies which is quite interesting.

From personal experience of trying to play old tunes (rather than songs), I definitely have to make my own interpretation of it based on my own experience. Sometimes you do come across some truly perplexing notation though, that really makes you wonder how it sounded originally. Some of the tunes in the Playford collection are super weird but as Playford was basically Top of the 17th Century Pops you have to assume it _did_ sound good however they used to play it :D