The Folk Singers

Heaney, brought up alongside Irish folk music tradition, has witnessed the technological changes overtaking ‘live’ musical activity beloved of the Irish. He weaves the ‘new’ vocabulary of commercialised sound-production, ‘turn-tables’ and ‘grooves’, into a lament.

 

A country boy wiling time away in the city prepares to listen to music on a turn-table. He reflects on his actions: vinyl recordings mean that the same track of well-known lyrics can be played and replayed on demand: Re-turning time-turned words. New technology has resulted in studio-recorded changes in musical reproduction and a new dexterity in using the equipment: fitting each weathered song/ To a new grooved harmony. ‘New’ musicians with record deals pluck slick strings and influence emotions: swing/ A sad heart’s equilibrium.

Traditional rural affections grew as slowly as the oyster produces its pearl, cool, deep but fragile: Numb passion, pearled in the shy/ Shell of a country love… strung on a frail tune.

The ‘new’ delivery is musically slick and tight, sharp now but the whole re-branding exercise and its movement from country to city jars on Heaney as it strikes a pose/ Like any rustic new to the bright town.

Traditional songs performed live are now pre-packed tales, repackaged to sell in their tens of thousands in suburbia. To the country boy this amounts to a debasement, music ‘tarted up’ to be peddled to a new audience: pale love/ Rouged for the streets.

We sense that Heaney is fundamentally unimpressed by the opiate effect of catchy tunes used to hypnotise and drown the pain of shallow love: Humming/ Solders all broken hearts

Whereas, before the time of bland modern pale love-music, the passionate victims of unrequited love might have considered suicide; new guitar effects numb intensity of feeling: Death’s edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming.

• Progress in music technology in the 1950s and 60s had brought both popular and traditional music within reach of a huge and increasingly suburban audience (vinyl proved more durable than Bakelite records of the 40’s); the age of the CD came much later and the i-pod later still;
• the sounds produced from the grooves of the revolving record passed via a sharp needle or diamond head along a moving arm into the amplification system of the record-player; the whole apparatus was fraught with difficulties; any clumsiness might result in scratching the record permanently or damaging the arm itself; Heaney offers vocabulary familiar amongst listeners;
• Strikes a pose like any rustic: Heaney is effectively reiterating his own recent situation; that of a country boy who came up to university, feeling the need to find his way and create an impression ; 

             

• 3 five-line stanzas based around 6 and 7 syllables; free verse save Humming/ strumming in the final three lines;
• the vocabulary contrasts rural and suburban life: weathered/ sad/ numb/  shy/ death’s edge/broken heart as opposed to sharp/ pose/ bright town/ narcotic;
• music is used as a metaphor for sentimentality;
• the title provides the first example of words in the poem that open different lines of enquiry: folk music is a genre in its own right; before recorded music it was performed and passed from generation to generation live; its ballads were provoked by emotions and relationships. It is now within reach of a hugely wider audience, but, Heaney suggests, the ersatz feelings lack the  intensity of the real thing;
• similarly pre-packed: musically self-repeating, without the improvisations open to live musicians;
• similarly swing: musical rhythm generating body movement; an influence, as in ‘swing opinion’;
• similarly strings/ strung: guitars have strings; pearls are strung together to form necklaces;
• similarly fitting: adapting to, accepting change; placing a record  around the central nub of a turn-table; appropriate;
• paired alliterations: shy/ shell/ pre-packed;
• assonant effects: [uː] new/ grooved;  [ɪ] slick strings/ swing/ equilibrium; [ʌ]  country love/ strung/ rustic/ humming/ blunts/ strumming   [e] Death’s edge;
• Oxymoron: numb passion.