"SONGS THAT BIND."

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10020, 16 April 1910, Page 4

"SONGS THAT BIND."

One is pleasantly surprised to learn, upon the authority of one of the American correspondents of "The Times," that "nearly all the English folk songs which are specially suit able for open-air performance, have stood the test of transplanting in the reservation of our race beyond the seas." The love of English folkmusic, he thinks, is one of those bonds of Empire which are none, the weaker because they are invisible to the tourist who keeps to the high ways, the steel rails between East and West. "In every part of the high prairies, along the fur traders' trails into the Far North, and even in tne { four-colour communities, where white, red, brown, and yellow men live on a salmon cannery or a placer mine, from Fort St. Michael down to San Francisco, the Dan and Beersheba of the? Pacific Stone I have found; vestiges o? English t'olkmusic." While all of this may be perfectly true, it is still assuming rathir too much to conclude that old English folk-songs bind the Empire everywhere. Those who have sojourned at the outposts of Antipodean civilisation can bear ample testimony to that. Back block lyrics beneath the Southern Cross are fashioned from lass durable stuff. For the most part they are rounded upon a foundation

of pure bathos. In the shearer's hut, the bushman's tent, or the rabbiter's whare, the tedium of the few hours bridging the gulf between toil and slumber is lightened chiefly with weird melodies, given with that inimitable nasal, inflection characterise tic of the average rural worker's vocal efforts, treating unctuously of

some devout lover and*his faithful but ill starred lass, or else reciting lugubriously the vicissitudes of "darling mother" or "pure old dad."' Of sturdy English folk-songs, not a trace is to be discerned. It is mostly sickly sentimentality whose praises are'chanted—eitlier that or the dubious exploits of some picturesque ruffian who has been made to realise that the way of the transgressor, however dashing and §vivid he may, be, hard.