I went to my first UK folk festival this week. I went because my dance group was going, but the concerts were an extra joy. I grew up listening many of the songs on my parents’ records, but now instead of a recording I was listening with hundreds of others under a rising moon.
As a teenager, I thought lyrics I couldn’t understand held some mysterious meaning that I would eventually understand. I was disappointed to learn that Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” initially had the placeholder lyrics “Scrambled eggs / Oh, my baby, how I love your legs.” Eventually I realized that the songwriters of the past had churned out plenty of faux-meaningful material, and material that meant completely different things to different people.
Folk music has plenty of material that’s survived because it’s especially good, and also material that’s just survived. “You can sing along if you want,” said one singer after a hey-diddle-down type chorus at the festival. “But you don’t have to, it’s pretty daft really.”
When we got up to dance in front of the stage, some of the songs were universal stories. There were themes you could find in lots of times and places: couples getting pregnant and in trouble, robbery gone wrong, and the risks of getting drunk with prostitutes. But also some idiosyncratic ones: a guy killing a wild boar, and a magic ring that tells you when your lover is marrying someone else.
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One of the most charmingly earnest early LessWrong articles was called To like each other, sing and dance in synchrony. It explains, with citations, that humans like doing these things together.
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On the same night in other places, people were dancing together to reggaeton, country, and house music. They danced to new songs and old songs about sex, heartbreak, money, jealousy, and triumph. None of these were great works in an Apollonian way, but in a Dionysian way. The important part was that people stayed up late with their friends under the moon.