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It's quite common in folk music to use clever metaphors to cloak a song's true meaning. For example, the traditional English folk tune "John Barleycorn" looks l
by n4r9 3y ago
It's quite common in folk music to use clever metaphors to cloak a song's true meaning. For example, the traditional English folk tune "John Barleycorn" looks like a murder ballad at first sight, but is in fact describing the harvest of barley and it's many uses (especially alcoholic!):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn
Country music has strong roots in English and Irish folk music, so there are a lot of thematic crossovers.
- n4r9 3y agoFollow-up comments: - its* (facepalm) - The excellent folk music website MainlyNorfolk has a fascinating amount of detail about this tune: https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/johnbarleycorn.html https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/johnbarleycorn.html
- 082349872349872 3y ago> ...the sceptical incline to think it may be an invention or refurbishing carried out by some educated antiquarian. If so, he did his work long ago and successfully, for the ballad was already in print in the early years of the seventeenth century... That's an amusing possibility. I'm inclined to assign authorship of JB to "Trad." but do believe I ran into a similar case of a joke running for a few thousand years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39658391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39658391