Trad Songs Centering Women & Queerness
In June, I posted in a facebook group for traditional ballads and songs[1] asking for recommendations:
What traditional folk songs feature women or queer protagonists with agency?
I’m looking for trad songs that center women or queer stories. especially ones where the protagonist makes choices that have impact and emotional depth. I’m less interested in love songs where the woman has no agency in the story.
I have versions of the cruel mother (roud 9) and Jackie munro (roud 268) that I love.
there are lots of contemporary songs written in the trad style which are wonderful, and I’m always interested to hear more of those, but rn I’m specifically looking to learn more old songs.
what are some of your favorites? thanks for sharing!
Within about a week, the post had over 200 comments full of recommendations and thoughts to read through. What a gold mine! I went through the comments and put all the songs into a spreadsheet. I filtered out duplicates[2], removed contemporary songs[3], skipped songs with g**** in the title, and otherwise listed every song mentioned. I haven’t gone through to decide if I agree with the recommender that the song they shared fits my prompt, or whether I like the songs.
There were many more songs empowering women than explicitly queer, which is unfortunately not that surprising to see. I’m still very interested to learn of more queer and feminist songs; please send me your favorites.
Here is the resulting spreadsheet!
I’m excited to look through these songs and learn more about them all, and glad I can share this resource with others who are excited about queer and woman centered trad music. Let’s learn these songs, sing them out, and make them our own. ❤️
Audrey Jaber by Angela DeCarlis
I have complex feelings about still being on facebook, but this experience is a perfect example of why I’m still there. I asked for recommendations on a very niche topic in a very specific group, and got over 200 comments worth of songs and thoughts from folks all over who I’ve mostly never met in person that share my passion for folk music. For better or worse, right now facebook is still the place where many of these small hobby communities are virtually connected. ↩︎
I was listing multiple names when duplicates were recommended at first, but as I got further in I ran out of steam and stopped keeping track of the full list of people who recommended each song. Several songs were recommended by multiple people but only the first commenter is on the sheet, sorry about that. ↩︎
“What is trad” is a complex question that I’m not going to try to answer here - I think my view on it is related to a song having passed through multiple hands over some unspecified but long-ish amount of time. I think it’s possible for a song to both “be trad” and also be originally written by a known author who may still be alive. But for this spreadsheet, I specifically wanted to collect old songs. I decided to define “old” as old enough to be in the public domain (currently that means written pre-1931), and so I (possibly imperfectly) filtered out ones newer than that. ↩︎