Folk music and folklore

Anyone interested in folk music and folklore? I guess you are as this is the forum of a folk metal band. What are the folk music and folklore of your country like and what do they mean to you?

Well, Hungarians are very proud of having about 200,000 folk songs. That's a large number. Here's some of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MipXbFUp6Y0
And Danube Swabian folk music, which is called sramli. A very nice song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHzU88jYygQ
Hungarians don't really dig it, they used to wrote parodies of our folk songs in Hungarian. They also parodised our accent in those writings. (It disappeared a long time ago due to the assimilation. Thank goodness. It was funny indeed.)
My father was a real folklore freak, he collected books on folklore and tons of objects in his flat. Not that he had a big flat. Agricultural tools, chests, jugs, textile materials, spinning wheels, busó masks and many things connected to old rustic life, even farm-wagon parts.
He took me to many folk music events and folklore camps. In those camps we learned how to make pots, baskets, trinkets, simple instruments and such.
And once we were to a Finno-Ugric folk festival with an ex girlfriend, it was very interseting. We met people from several Finno-Ugric ethnic groups and came to know their music and foods. Those were the most funny foods I ever tried. And some of them even invited us to dance with them to their folk music (cute tiny blonde girls with green eyes, it was cool).
Folk tales and art later.

Since America is so young we do not have the deep folkloric culture from the old world. Many of our tales are borrowed from the immigrants who came here for whatever personal/economic reasons they may have had. Native American stories are very interesting however, but it would be a very long post if I even tried to mention them. Many are lost because so many tribes have been killed, but the stories that remain are great though they are not taught in schools. They are even hard to find in books due to the Indians passing their histories down orally, so one would have to spend time with the tribes and listen to the stories.

A very old recording, but shows some great images: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuyQOeZN ... re=related
This video shows the flute, which many of you are probably familiar with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkeUP0BO ... re=related I hear similarities to traditional Asian flutes which further enhances the land bridge/migration of peoples explanations. That is a whole other story though...

Bluegrass can mostly be claimed as American, but even this style takes heavily from British/Irish influences in early America. Much of this is exemplified by the culture of Appalachia, in the mountains west of where I am from, the Appalachian Mountains. Many of these people came here for religious freedom alone and retreated to these mountainous/rural areas to practice their faith freely and subsequently jammed music, mostly praising god, but that soon morphed into stories of hard work, life in a new land, and the story telling style that would be adapted many years later by blues, jazz, and country/western artists.
A band that does their best to keep tradition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug7IgB8MfWE - Old Crow Medicine Show
These guys do some modern bluegrass and are a favorite of mine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjdkc14-zwQ - Trampled By Turtles

This bluegrass style would expand as America declared independence and began expanding both south and west. It is typified by minimal or a lack of percussion, the focus being on chorus style vocals and heavy strings. The speed of the banjo and mandolin picking has in-turn influenced many guitar players, metal musicians in particular. There are many slow paced bluegrass songs that are heavy lyrically and one can literally feel the pain and/or happiness in the song.

Bluegrass is cool, I like the high speed picking. I didn't know that it was called Bluegrass. I'm not really familiar with American music. Once I read a book about Afro-American music, Blues People by Leroi Jones. It was very exciting.
And once I read an anthology of North American Indian tales, I loved that book.

That's great. I hope to learn more about the variety of Euro folk music someday. There seem to be many varieties, at least to my ears, but also many common elements. That probably has more to do with the instruments than anything though. I really enjoy the gypsy jams from the Balkans for some reason, but other folk stuff is just as enjoyable.

I plan on going wild in Thailand as well. Curious to see what kind of traditional and modern music I can fuse together there.

I really enjoy the gypsy jams from the Balkans for some reason

We're not Balkan, but Gypsies are our largest minority. Their music affected ours. One of their favourite percussion instrument: milk-can http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=togNb6xlSBg
Budapest Gypsy Symphony Orchestra or 100 Violins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOzrHdpfRpc

Our folk tales are a bit special mostly because of the creatures who appear in them. The most awesome one is Vasorrú Bába or Iron Nosed Midwife. No shit. She's actually an evil witch, but if you address her as grandmother, she will offer her help. If you don't, she will kill you. She is a popular character in Slavic folklore as well, they call her Baba Yaga. As far as I know Baba Yaga is a little different from our Vasorrú Bába.
We have dragons. 3, 7 and 21 headed, in other tales 3, 6 and 12 headed dragons. A 1 headed dragon is not a dragon for us, so naturally I laughed my head off at the Hungarian dragon in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. 3 headed dragons are tenderfoots, they are easy to kill, the 21 headed ones are tough.
And tündér. We borrowed tündérs from Slavic folklore (vili). They are magical beings, similar to nymphs in Greek mythology. Our picture of tündér later changed due to Anglo-Saxon influence, it became elvish. Maybe this is why in the Hungarian version of The Lord of the Rings elf is translated as tünde (another word for tündér), althouhg tündérs have nothing to do with elves.
And we have tons of Matthias Corvinus tales. He wasn't a really good king actually, but he still became a folk hero.

[Ärväthyyll]

And tündér. We borrowed tündérs from Slavic folklore (vili). They are magical beings, similar to nymphs in Greek mythology. Our picture of tündér later changed due to Anglo-Saxon influence, it became elvish. Maybe this is why in the Hungarian version of The Lord of the Rings elf is translated as tünde (another word for tündér), althouhg tündérs have nothing to do with elves.

Our image of "vila", commonly translated as elf or fairy, slightly differes in the tales I know, but they're not LOTR-styled elves either. As a consequence, our translations of LOTR actually use a different word, a derivative from "vila". I think that although vilas are not exactly like Tolkien's elves, they are the closest mythological creaters to them.

And our dragons in fairytales usually have several heads too. Three is the most common, I think. And often, if you chop one head off, two new grow from the neck or something.

And we have tons of Matthias Corvinus tales. He wasn't a really good king actually, but he still became a folk hero.

I have a feeling we talked about this before somewhere? Matthias Corvinus is insanely popular here. He is burried under mt. Peca. When there will be too much injustice, he will wake up and save us. I guess he's our king Arthur.

Corvinus (known here as king Matthias, kralj Matjaž) under Peca:

Entry:


Him inside the cave (you can't go so close tho):

I have a feeling we talked about this before somewhere? Matthias Corvinus is insanely popular here. He is burried under mt. Peca. When there will be too much injustice, he will wake up and save us. I guess he's our king Arthur.

Yes, we did.
I didn't know that he has a grave under Peca.
As far as we know he was buried in Székesfehérvár (Alba Regia) in a cathedral which doesn't exist anymore. It was the burying-place of Hungarian kings until the 16th century. Only 100-150 meters from the house where my grandpa lives.

Some argue with that. They claim that another Alba Regia also existed somewhere in the Pilis Mountains and that's the place where King Matthias was buried.
The burying-place in Székesfehérvár was excavated in 2008, many graves were found, but they don't know exactly to whom do they belong. So he doesn't have an own grave over here, but he has a monument in the main street of Székesfehérvár. It's a shitty monument, we don't like it.

We don't wait for him to come back. In our tales he puts on a disguise and wanders all over the country in order to find and punish the unjust and tyrannizing ones.

[Ärväthyyll]

Yeah, sorry, I told that wrongly. The real Matthias Corvinus' corpse of course isn't under mt. Peca, but according to our legend he isn't dead, just sleeping, and he's sleeping there So when he rises again, he'll come from his cave under Peca. Hence the monument of him sleeping leaning on his table.

He was related to Vlad Tepes, was he not? Or perhaps just through marriage? I read somewhere he had mr. Impaler imprisoned at some point.

[Aldhissla]

At first, I did not know who you guys were talking about, because I knew Corvinus mainly under the name Hunyadi. He held the Impaler prisoner for twelve years (it was more of a political arrest than real imprisonment) and married him soon afterwards to one of his sisters or cousins (my primary source leaves her out completely - for whatever reason - and Wikipedia isn't sure about her status.

[Ärväthyyll]

Our folklore generally isn't much different than folklore of our surrounding nations. Then throughout history only church related texts were written down (forms, hymns ...), so we don't have much of the secular stuff preserved. What remains was written down in 18th or 19th century, which is very late.