NOT ONLY BY THE WORD *

 "And for the old-style play,

 For the music of the horn,

 To the native land, a long road home

 I'd passed a hundred times."

 ~ Aleksandr Tvardovsky


 A lullaby melody began to be heard over the cradle immediately after a baby's birth. The umbilical cord dries under the rhythmic creaking of the crib. So, it turned out the rhythm and melody met a man after birth and did not die down throughout one's life. Instead, they continue to be present and after his death ...

 A lullaby song differed with a slow, monotonous-sleepy rhythm. Its melody was tender and somewhat sad. Mother, grandmother or older sister, expressing their love for the baby, put into a lullaby song sorrow and tenderness, but never cry and rudeness was present in a lullaby. True, sometimes the mother, offended by in-laws or grandmother, not sleeping at night, rarely allowed herself to vent frustration and get rid of bad feelings through almost a family satire.


 "You, tooty, do not hum,
 Mother does not wake up,
 My mother is gloomy,
 Began to spin and fall asleep,
 A pig came and pushed her."


 The baby did not notice the ill representation of their grandmother by his mother, all of which are sung with the same melody, with the same tone as an ordinary lullaby. But what a terrible rift began in the child's soul when the child has once learned the meaning of such songs!

 Instead of lullabies, mother and grandmother sometimes sang many other long songs appropriate to the rhythm of falling asleep.

 Melodies of mourning or lament, just like a lullaby, were not very diverse. A lamenter, especially hired, often crossed to the recitative, and the real anguish of deceased relatives differed more in verbal than melodic imagery. Even the lament of the bride at a wedding was rather monotonous. But the wedding lament now and then is punctuated by girlish songs, different in the rhythm.
 Melodies of wedding songs are also varied, but the action is constantly changing, so the Russian folk wedding is very similar to a day's long opera. In any case, all the main features of the opera: drama, choral and solo performance, mass and choreography at the wedding are required. No matter how abundant drinks and food are, a holiday party was considered inferior without singing. Songs of celebration rang for hours - it was primarily festive fun, though, of course, not everyone knew all the words and melody.

 As in all things, singing is essential leadership, the ability to strike up a song, take the initiative and assume tacit leadership. So often at the table someone was able to strike up a song without knowing all the words, another person knew the words, but he could strike up a song or unsteadily knew the melody, and it seemed that the song was about to get dumped, like a fire on the moist autumn wind. But at the table always was someone essential at this point, and the song is not interrupted.

 However, there were, however, in each village one or two, maybe even more outstanding song experts with excellent hearing and voice, who knew hundreds of texts, with the ability not only verbal but also musical improvisation.

 The fate of Russian folk art of singing is, in its own way, tragic. Just as the national identity was split during Nikon's ecclesiastical reforms, and this split was exacerbated during the reign of Peter the Great, the united sea of songs began to get shallow and segmented and then finally divided into spiritual-religious and mundane, everyday parts. Both branches of the singing art separately slowly atrophied, contributing to city and western modernist trends.

 People still sang for some time such beautiful melodic songs like "Murmur of the reed" or "I am forgotten, forsaken." But they quickly disappeared, ridiculed by biting satire in the district and provincial newspapers. And the limericks completed the final blow...

 Unfortunately, the song tradition was interrupted. People do not sing old Russian songs, which a great singer Fedor Shalyapin did not even know. Only rarely "Golden Mountains" or "Peddlers" could be heard. Beautiful melodies of the war years, created by Soviet composers, lost statute too.

 Of course, a quickening of dance rhythms was going on at the expense of melodic variety. Aesthetic norms have changed. Soon people began to think that if the louder, the better, the faster, it is more beautiful. As a result, even the singing rhymes degenerated, declined artistic requirements, shouting and dirty dancing became available to all, the ability to sing and dance fell.

 Before these limericks, melodies were not uniform. In 20-es ditties were sung during the feast, as many long songs. They were sung during the festive walking in the village streets and entirely different in the choral dance and square dancing.
         The ancient Russian summer festivals combined gaming, dancing, and song elements. Degeneration began with the gradual loss of this harmony. Initially, the circular dance disappeared the game part, the storyline, then, along with the quickening pace of dancing, choreography and the lyrical content became more primitive …
 The runaround is gradually replaced by ever-increasing dancing in a circle.
      The melodically diverse choral songs through the quadrille slowly turned into couplets. Thus, in a monotonous dance were levelled summer and winter dances ... The winter circle is too small. In the crowds, there is limited space, no matter how large is a party hut. In such circumstances, paced, slow, but meaningful dance followed by a rapid tap dance in one place, born and fashion for a dancing competition. Mass participation and democracy of the choral dance are impossible and in the dance, involves only two (with the accordion player - three participants). All the others turn into the audience. But to dance and sing at a party want all, so the dancing competition often becomes the cause of some stupid scuffles...

 Ancient dances are pretty diverse in their subject, but they always served the interests of young people (acquaintance, choice, courtship). Echoes of these round dances have survived until now, but separately: in the game, in the songs, the dances. For a long time, until the early postwar years, Kharovsk region of Vologda region kept a choral "Snowstorm" dance reminiscent of the urban quadrille. Older people and now on holiday dance "in a circle," slowly, all together, first in one direction, then the other. This choir sings ditties to the accordion. Figures of their dancing movements did not differ with rollicking. The dancers do not throw their legs above the head, do not jump like circus performers, and do not swirl at one place, waving their long dresses, as is done in many professional ensembles.
     The top of women's dancing skill was considered to walk in a circle slowly and gracefully as if carrying an expensive vessel with some precious contents on the head. A female dancer's feet under a long sarafan move, lead count and tap, while she seems to float on water. Men danced more freely but without somersaults over the head and crack of palms on the top of boots.

 A good dancer could not humiliate himself with indecent behaviour in the circle: a drunken appearance, ease, singing obscene songs, etc. On the contrary, even having lost the rhythm while dancing or singing, he considered it essential to apologize to the public and explain the cause of the failure ...
 "Sorry, the song got me confused,
 Things are not fun,
 I was promised this week
 To be cheated on."

 It could be that after such a revelation, a frivolous girl would change her mind, and betrayal would not happen...
 Similar song apologies were quite typical for the traditional folk festivals.

" Excuse me,
 I made a stranger to play.
 And my loved one
 I left far away."

 In the prewar years, when it became fashionable to ignore as musty village opinion, still people bolted to the sides from drunken dancers...


"In an unfamiliar village
 I came and even danced.
 And I ask no strangers.
 To make any comments!"

 More and more got heated and pushy the unrestrained hooligan. These, so to speak, dancers provoked the whole campaign against dancing in general: the accordion and folk rhyme became the attributes of backwardness and barbarism, in villages and towns became trendy so-called modern dancing.

 "The Madam" dance, as embodied in its Glinka "Kamarinskaya," was the basis of folk dancing as the musical as choreography senses. All sorts of variants allow dancers to be different from each other.

 The excellent dancers were famous in the surrounding townships; the bad was laughed at.

 The collective choral dance in the 1930-es began to be displaced by the couple and single dancing. Most fashionable became so-called "pereplyas" (in a dance contest of endurance) which can be put in one row with competition in speed and volume of singing. Men danced on the bet, showing pride before women. Dancing in these cases resembled the athletic contest in which participated and the accordion player. If the dancers competed with each other, then the accordion player, at times to exhaustion, competed with both of them. He had to "outplay" them.

 Before, some people danced for fun and sometimes from sorrow.

 Some men and women dancers were very fond of dancing barefoot outdoors. But, indoors, just opposite was favoured "the tap" shoe, as sang in the limerick:

 "Badly the felt boots pound,
 I will put on the high boots.
 To get hooked up with a good girl.
 Hey, friend, please help me."

 There was dancing (and playing the accordion) that was serious with a total sense of responsibility for its aesthetic and moral side. But later, more and more often, people danced as if in jest, boastfully and awkward. The swagger of a man allegedly gave him a right to lousy game and clown's dance. This kind of dancer would come out on the range, begin clowning and hiding behind this behaviour his artistic failure with loudness, and sometimes bawdy ditties.

 Even the least capable person, but taking to the dance in earnest, with dignity, evoked in people more respect than a skillful but an affected dancer. Interesting that good serious dancers, who got wounded in the war and returned home lame, continued to dance at festivals. To make fun of their dance to anyone even did not occur.
 Anfisa Ivanovna (author's mother) told me that in Timonikha lived a shepherd Pavlik (accent on the last syllable). He rose at dawn, slowly walked down the street and loudly blew in a birch horn... Lazy, sleepy housewives grumbled at him but rose to the feet. They headed out the cattle. They fired the oven. They went to the well to fetch water. They kneaded the dough for bread or pies.

 Life in the village started with the dense sound of that long, six-foot, covered bark tape tube. Sometimes for convenience, it was flexed in a ring (its principle sounds the same as that of the copper horn). Sometimes some shepherds had a set of these bass pipes.

 From the sounds of dulcimers, nozzles, bagpipes now are left only distant echoes ... But the softly-sad tone of the hornpipe / (temper is a "smell" of a musical sound) and the same familiar, pervasive tone of the horn sung by poet Tvardovsky, still speaks in a rustic wind, can be heard in the murmuring of a brook, felt in the bitterness of the morning stove smoke. Like just yesterday, the horn and hornpipe were played on among those gray pine log cabins, trimmed with greenery palisades and meadows.

 In the sheep's or a bull's horn in the hollow middle was inserted only one reed, and how gently and in own unique way sings the horn! It was talking while singing...

 From the ancient flute remained a monotonous willow whistle. But if you take the spring willow twig, "drill" the core, burn a hole in the side five or six holes, then plug one end and carefully split it, make an incision with a razor blade, a peculiar wind instrument will come out of it. The sound of this whistle will not be similar to any other. A bell made of birch bark bands (the same one from which woven bast shoes) changed and amplified the sound of the horn that can play tunes of average complexity.

 Balalaikas were self-made too, and the higher was the master carpenter's art, the better was the sound of an instrument, fused from thin spruce planks with the fish glue. Instead of the strings were put twisted and dried lamb intestines. Savvy people made musical sounds of the most primitive, it would seem entirely inappropriate things, for example, from the papers and the natural horny comb, of a hollow reed, of a broad tree leaf, birch bark, etc. As percussion instruments at any time could be used regular spoons or shepherd's tambourine. When at hand was nothing at all, when all the accordion players have gone to the war, the girls danced with the voice and tong imitation. But this desperate situation happened quite rarely.

 The accordion was entrenched in people's lives because of its "sonority," which may be due to urban influence. Countless talyanki, livenki, bologovki, trekhryadki, hromki (all kinds of accordions) for some half a century filled not only the Russian North-West, but, apparently, and the whole of Russia, indignantly wrote F.I. Shalyapin. And he was right, speaking of the loss of public choral art. The accordion and the limericks almost wholly replaced the culture of polyphony, as well as old songs of Dorian and Phrygian harmonies.

 Traditional folk instruments - trumpet, flute, balalaika, hornpipe subsided, not able to withstand the pressure brassy, somewhat cheeky singer.

 But no matter how we treat the accordion, we have to give tribute to this newly-minted and self-confident companion of national life. It long and faithfully served the Russian people. Yes, it still does, although club officials are often persecuted, probably because of its too excessive familiarity ... In space, it has not yet been taken. Still, on the tanks and destroyers, it already has lived. It has visited many European capitals.

 One can not recall that the accordion has gone off the primitive talyanka to quite decent musical instrument capabilities.

 The accordion in a peasant family was an heirloom; it was cherished as the apple of the eye. By value, it was equal to the rifle, a good cow, a new bathhouse, a pocket watch or a three-piece man suit. An accordion player, who owned it, was the first guest at weddings and holidays. He was treated as a close relative. The girls were singing to him; the friends protected him during fights. By the style and tone of accordion playing, people would find out who and where goes for a party.

 Folk musical aesthetics is inconceivable without a natural rhythm, without a variety of world voices. Even the crackling logs in the oven and the noise of a flame affected the mental state. Deafening shots in the frosty Epiphany night slightly interrupted the slumber of a commoner as if to remind them that everything was okay. A rooster's singing secured the sensation of the night calm. And how diverse are the forest noises, depending on the weather and the nature of the forest! Or the splash of the lake or seawater, putting to sleep a tired fisherman.
      The thunderstorm (and it only happens in a time when there is no time for rest) frightens stirs the soul with their mighty roar and terrible splendour of lightning. The noise of an intense night wind also does not let a person sleep; they rise from the bed and drive into the field to remove the remnants of the harvest. Merging sounds of nature and musical sounds evokes a feeling of magic.

 Imagine the endless summer forest with its fading, then re-growing, infinitely large noise, with few alarming cries whether woodpeckers, whether little hares, with a barely perceptible sound of mosquito bands. And suddenly, to this broad ecumenical noise adds singing some fantastic musical bird. The shepherd's horn's sad and gentle voice is so necessary, among these temperate natural forests! It leads a melody, and it is like a thin thread that connects the world's vastness with man's soul.

 Imagine, as into the forest murmur or the sound of splashing in the lake water are pouring in measured, thick strokes of a large but distant bell.

 However, to imagine is one thing, and listening in reality - is quite another. To listen, for example, some solemn and joyful bells among the windy spring noise and the first bird singing under the hot sun, cold blue water and the freshness of the original newborn green. A ringing of bells among the autumn clarity, in the chilling silence seen again in new ways. We will not recall the terrible roar of the alarm bells among the silent night ...

LIMERICKS ***

 Feodor Chaliapin detested the limericks; he considered the harmonica a German instrument contributing to primitivism and degeneration of the mighty and ancient vocal and choral Russian music.

 Wondering about this, he asks: "What happened to them (i.e. the people) that they forgot songs and started to sing a ditty, this bleak, this intolerable and mediocre vulgarity? Maybe we need to blame the factory, maybe those shiny, rubber overshoes, a wool scarf, for no apparent reason envelop the neck on a bright summer day when the birds sing so well? Maybe a corset is worn over a dress by rural women? Or is it damn German harmonica, which he so lovingly holding under his arm, a working man on the day of rest? I simply cannot explain... I only know that the limerick is not a song, but a magpie, and not even a natural bird, but an obscenely painted mischief. And how well people used to sing! They sang in the fields, in the haylofts, on the banks of rivers, the streams, forests and at the evening works."

 However, no matter what was said about the limericks, no matter what was thought by fate, it became the most common, the most popular of all the living folklore genres. Accumulated over many centuries energy of the language does not disappear with the demise of any (e.g. epic) style. It can appear in the most unexpected forms, such as folklore and literature.

 Fedor Ivanovich Shalyapin had a reason to be indignant: the limericks occupied too much space in the family of folk art. Once upon a time, in addition to choral singing at the parties, street choral singing lived and prospered. Still, the long choral songs gradually became short. Simultaneously, dance steadily degenerated into contemporary dance.
 You could even say that the degeneration of long songs into limericks accompanied the transformation of a circular dance into the dance. At the end of the last century, the slow pace of choral tempo was gradually replaced by fast dancing tempo, communal dancing by couples, and single dancing. Along with all this, a long story breaks up into many small pieces at a relatively rapid pace.

 And the limerick went for a walk-in Russia it could not be stopped either by any social trouble or by the adoption of amateur art in every village or small town.
 It lived and lives on its own, by its own rules. Nobody knows how many limericks exist, considering whether there are thousands or millions. Apparently, many folklore collectors did not even understand that the limericks, even to a greater extent than the proverbs, embedded in the way of life, so when they seized from its ethnic musical and verbal environment, it died immediately. What will understand a reader, for example, from such four-liner:


 Another girl because of her lover

 Lost the appetite,

 But in my case, after betrayal.

 I was eating like a pig.


 Readers need a considerable imagination to see noisy rustic festivities, imagine a "coming out" to the circle, dancing and challenging, with the expectation to be heard singing. One needs to understand the state of a girl, who was betrayed, her sometimes strange condition when she laughs through her tears, is cheerful and desperate at the same time, and hides her misfortune with jokes.
 According to some researchers, women's ditties were created chiefly by men; I don't think it will hold water. Limericks are created and established for a specific occasion, often while dancing, sometimes in advance to make one or another statement. For example, there could be a love confession, the threat to a possible rival, encouragement of not a very brave suitor, the announcement of the break-up, asking a friend or someone to "hook up" with somebody.

 A love limerick is the most common and most numerous. After March, recruits and work limericks, if I may say so, appeared political, expressive of candid social protest in some periods. Prison, bullying and obscene limericks accurately reflect changes and developments in the moral structure of everyday life ignorance of the artistic tradition.

 It would be foolish to assert that there were no obscene ditties in traditional folklore. Of course, they were present, but they were sung very rarely and then only in particular, mostly male company, as if furtively. To sing a bawdy ditty for all the good people could just the last drunkard, who does not value his excellent name. "Progress" in the spread of talent, but bawdy ditties began at the turn of the XX century with some lines such as: "I wanted my honey to press to the woodpile, the pile rolled out, and my honey ran away." Excessive frankness and directness compensate by the fantastic vividness. Later the same obscene rhyme becomes more cynical, untrustworthy, abstract. The relationship of such folklore opuses with drunkenness is apparent.

 Interestingly, limericks were sung in cases where it was fun or when people were bored. Sometimes it was singing during unbearable grief, taking the form of a confession or a complaint against fate. Thus, during the street dance, a young widow sang and cried at once:


 My dear was killed,

 Yes, and I would gladly die.

 Neither that one nor this one

 Would regret about us.


 And the dancing and singing in such cases assumed functions of weeping, lamentations.

 The meaning of many limericks, like proverbs, is sometimes ambiguous. It is revealed only in certain circumstances, depending on who, where, how and why a person sings.


 "The chairman of the collective farm, you are golden,
 The Brigadier, you are silver.
 Let me take a day off,
 Today is a rainy day."


 Again, you need to know that you have to work, mow or reap on a sunny day, and you can rest in lousy weather. You can sing either way, whether with internal sarcasm or sincere respect. But this, for example, limerick, one can hardly sing in any other way:

" My dear, cherished,
 By the braids noticeable.
 During harvest on the strip,
 A scarlet thread in the braid."


 At the table and in the public dancing "circle," the second half of the ditties sung collectively, the familiar words were picked up immediately. To start singing could help any one of those who were present. Maiden dance brought to life a unique limericks dialogue, during which they expressed worldly joys and grievances, asked intimate questions and told responses, rivals are criticized or unkind relatives.

 A limerick dialogue in dance could occur between two friends, between rivals, between a man and a woman, between two lovers, between two relatives. The threat, flattery, compliment, calling, denial - all the things that people are ashamed or afraid to express directly, easily and naturally in folk songs.

 In the popular rhyme (monologue) is reflected confessional energy. In folklore, storerooms are any limerick to express any feelings, any shades of mental state. But if appropriate lines cannot be recalled or a singer does not know them, they invent entirely new ones.

 Quite many are couplets addressed to the accordion player. Sometimes they sound downright flattery, even fawning. But, you could do anything to dance once in a blue moon, to pour out the soul in song! Especially in those days, when so many accordion players have settled on an eternal sleep in their graves unmourned (after WWII).