Johnny Cash & Bob Dylan - Girl from the north country

Modern Day Folk Ballad based on the 17th century

English Popular Ballad "Scarborough Fair"

Spotlight on Music McGraw Hill

American Folk Music

"On his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, there is a song called

"Girl from the North Country." The song has very simple lyrics, in which

the singer asks a traveler to say hello to a girl he once knew, who lives

near a fair that the traveler may be visiting.

That song is remarkably similar to "Scarborough Fair," recorded three

years later and included on Simon and Garfunkel's albumParsley Sage

Rosemary and Thyme. In the song, the traveler is asked to say hello to

a girl, but the singer goes on to make a number of mysterious requests.

The singer wants the girl to make him a cambric shirt, and to find him an

acre of land beside the sea which she must tend with "a sickle of leather."

Paul Simon learned the song from Martin Carthy, an English folk musician,

and Carthy found them in a group of northern English folk songs collected

by Frank Kidson in the late nineteenth century.

Both songs are remarkably similar to a ballad known as "The Elfin Knight."

The earliest published version of it appeared in 1673, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

It is undoubtedly much older, and belongs to the medieval tradition of games

and rhymes in which the devil sets nine riddles, or tasks. Twelve versions of the

song were collected by Francis J. Child, and included in The English and Scottish

Popular Ballads, published between 1892 and 1894. In most of these,

an elf sets a maiden a number of impossible tasks, including sewing a shirt

without seams and planting corn on the barren sand beside the sea.

One Scottish example, which Child found in an 1810 book of nursery rhymes,

has the refrain "Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme."

Another Scottish example asks the traveler,

"Did ye ever travel twixt Berwick and Lyne?"

Most were collected in northern England and Scotland,

but one was collected in New York, by way of Massachusetts.

The traveler in this version is traveling to Cape Ann, on the Massachusetts coast.

We can say that this version is an authentic American folk song.

Folk music, as Woody Guthrie said, is ".music of the people, by the people,

and for the people." It is the musical expression of a community at work and at play,

in celebration and in mourning, in love and out of love, at war and at peace.

The community can be a household, a farm, a village, or it can be a whole nation.

Folk songs are not composed music: they have evolved, often over many generations,

out of the lives of men and women. They continue to evolve as they are passed on

from generation to generation, and from musician to musician. This process is known

as oral transmission."

http://spotlightonmusic.macmillanmh.com/music/teachers/articles/folk-and-traditional-styles/anglo-american-folk-music