In a completely unseasonal move, not too long ago I read two cultural histories of Halloween — Nicolas Rogers’ Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night and David J. Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday. Both books look at the grab bag of vaguely Anglo-Celtic traditions that merged with American-style commercialism, graphic design, mass media, and vandalism to produce the current late-October retail juggernaut. Along the way, both authors provide refreshers on bonfire night, Old World recreational fortune-telling practices, queer appropriations of Halloween masking, poison candy urban legends, and the like. If, like me, you’re a long time Halloween nerd, none of this is uncharted territory. One thing that did “click” for me was that (and I believe the Rogers book pointed this out) the festival from whence Halloween came (Hallowtide) was actually the beginning of Christmastide. Of course, the old timey Anglo-Celtic Christmas season was quite a different celebration than our current partly-Victorian-inspired carnival of wholesome consumerism.
Christmas, once upon a time, involved a lot more pranking, public rowdiness, and general transgressing than today’s “traditional” time of family get-togethers and material displays of affection. Various house-visiting practices and charity/begging took place across this long post-harvest holiday season. Souling and wassailing practices are often seen as the origins of modern trick-or-treating and caroling traditions. These now exotic traditions highlighted the places where the liturgical and agricultural calendars intersect. In today’s culture of commerce and Pop-focused mass media, “traditions” are usually just wholesome veneers constructed to support consumer practices. Any deep-rooted symbolism is often obscured by images and stories originating in cola advertisements or department store promotions.
Frost and Fire is an interesting collection, focusing as it does on the “Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs” that was used to commemorate traditional seasonal celebrations. Of course, this album is a product of ‘60s “folk revival” tastes and ‘60s ideas about “authenticity.” I’m not really purist on these matters and certainly not an expert on British folk music/revival. What is appealing about this collection for me is that, to my rock/pop ears, the unaccompanied, roughish vocal harmonies singing of birds and wine and such sounds exactly how I imagine my beloved imaginary past to sound. It’s very “Olde England,” but unpretentiously without the curlicues and sonic adornments that connote Renaissance Fair. The overall effect is sort of a Plastic Ono Band version of medieval-ish ritual – a “Strange, Fey England” counterpart to the “Old, Weird America” found on the Anthology of American Folk Music and re-imagined by Dylan and his Band on the Basement Tapes.
I suppose that it’s fitting that these songs harkening back to liminal-season rituals also suggest the transition from a world where unique pre-industrial European and American traditional/regional practices existed in isolated pockets to a world where almost everything (including “tradition”) is mediated (by electronics, expectations, pop stardom, hype, etc.) such that entertainment and ritual are influenced by a commercial monoculture. I’m not lamenting the passing of some purer, simpler time – an era which likely never existed (or if it did exist was probably a trifle inconvenient and not nearly as quaint as I imagine it). Rather, I am interested in the ways which historical or traditional cultural memes mutate and live on. The self-consciously rustic Frost and Fire helps to organize ideas about seasons and traditional celebrations so that listeners can understand what they mean and how they function – much in the same way that Halloween helps Americans organize and understand immigrant traditions and pranking traditions and “fancy dress” parties that gave rise to the very American modern Halloween holiday.
I’ve listened to this album a lot since I bought it last year. Still, I can’t quite make sense of it or boil it down like I’d normally do with a record by a pop/rock group. I keep going back to it. Perhaps I’m being sentimental and don’t want to have at something that “seems timeless” or whatever. There’s a clarity to this album and to the nasal ring of the Watersons’ co-mingling voices.
