Where Are the Men?

I was raised on Celtic folk music -- my mother is 1/4 Welsh, and though her Scottish (and Scotch-Irish) ancestry is a bit further back, she raised us on the music, sang to us, found records, and introduced us to the Clancy Brothers, the Irish Rovers, and the Child Ballads. Later, I discovered the living tradition of Celtic folk, and fell in love with Silly Wizard, the Tannahill Weavers, and many others. When I was in Wales in 2001, I discovered contemporary Welsh folk music, which often doesn't spread as far because a lot of it is -- well, in Welsh. That's ok. I've got a bunch of it now, and it's stunning. I've also read books of Celtic folk ballads, collected by everyone from Cecil Sharpe to American versions of Celtic songs collected by John Jacob Niles. You might say I'm a folk song junkie. :) Obviously straight English songs mix in with a lot of these, making it a bit hard to entirely sift them out, so I learned a great many of these as well.

This is a preface to discussing the role of men in Celtic folk (this may be more widespread than just Celtic, but that's the area I'm most familiar with). And one thing I began to see is that the role of men in many of these songs is very problematic. Not a surprise, considering that these songs represent people's actual life experiences, even when they are written as stories. They are enduring because they talk about something immediate and visceral.

Sometimes women's experiences are quietly implied in a song, rather than spoken. For every ballad in which a man murders his lover, for every version of "The Shearin's No For You" (a flat-out story of rape dressed up as a love song), and the quiet desperation of "Bushes and Briars" ("But if I should go to my love, my love he will say nay/If I show to him my boldness/He'll never love me again") there's a song where a man's role isn't obvious, either because he isn't there when he should be, or because his role has a good deal of ambiguity, that can be unpicked only when one thinks through the consequences of his actions.

I've gotten a couple of good stories out of folk songs. I was listening to a fair number of stories of women running off to sea dressed as men to be with their lovers. That (and the first season of "Deadliest Catch" and a documentary on rogue waves) came together to become "Following Seas" -- a story where the lover in question was not, perhaps, all he made out to the young woman.

"Cruel Sister" is a ballad that had troubled me for a long time. There are hundreds of versions, including "The Bonny Swans" (done beautifully by Loreena McKennitt.) However, I heard the Pentangle version first, and in that one and many others, the lover woos _both_ sisters, which is what precipitates the murder of one sister by another. This problematic detail stuck in my head until I got it out by writing "Swan Song", a story in which the lover has ulterior motives for courting both girls.

So recently I've managed to listen to two version of "Cruel Mother" -- Silly Wizard's early recording of "Carlisle Wall", and Susan McKeown's version of "The Bonny Greenwood Side". This is a difficult song. It tells of a woman giving birth to either one or two children by herself in the woods or some completely isolated place, and then killing them. Later, she sees a child or a pair of children and tells them she wishes they were hers, it turns out they are indeed her dead children, and they condemn her to hell for murdering them.

The knee-jerk response is to say, "What a horrible person the mother is! How could a mother kill her own children!" And of course I feel this way -- I have three boys, and cannot imagine harming them. And unlike in "Cruel Sister", I've never really heard any real ambiguity in this song.

But -- one line in "The Bonny Greenwood Side" caught my ear recently and made me re-think. The line is, "She was the smallest maid of them all". That line implies vulnerrability, either in age, or in physical size. And suddenly it dawned on me: Where is the father?

What happened that a woman would be desperate enough to give birth by herself and kill her children? Was it incest? Rape? Seduction with a promise of marriage? In our modern world, programs which allow women to abandon their newborns at a hospital have cut down the murder rate of children killed by desperate teenage girls who are afraid their parents will abuse them or throw them out if they find out they had given birth. And that's in our modern time.

In a time when being an unwed mother brought down sanctions of church as well as state, in a time when a girl might be killed because she was carrying an illegitimate child, at a time when that mother would be blamed even if she were an incest victim, what recourse would a young woman have if she were to get pregnant? And suddenly this song turns into even more of a tragedy than it seems on the surface.

I don't know if this will make its way into one of my stories. Certainly there's something to be said here which hasn't been covered. But it's something to think over.