Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

We had a bit of a slow day at work today. I spent the time reading about folk music on the internet, as you do, and I found these really fascinating articles on the history of 'The Water is Wide' and 'Scarborough Fair' (the site also has articles on various other folk and modern songs, but those were the ones I know best).

It's amazing how these apparently fairly simple songs can have such complex, convoluted histories, and endlessly interesting to delve into them. Songs influence each other and cross over, writers poach verses from existing songs to use in 'new' ones, written and oral traditions feed back into each other over time. 'The Water is Wide' and its ancestors seem to be related to and/or occasionally share verses with just about every other English or Scottish traditional song on a vaguely similar subject there is, some of them very different otherwise.

'Scarborough Fair' is of course one of the best-known folk songs, but nearly all the modern versions seem to have forgotten what are some of the most important things about it in its earlier forms—it's a duet, and it's supposed to be funny—and I think this is a shame. (Emily Smith's 'Sweet Lover of Mine' gets it right, however!)