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May 1, 2008
a good folk song
A good folk song is easy to learn and hard to forget. Its melody is brief, its chorus repeats, its rhymes read from line to line like the base pairs in a chain of DNA. A folk song is a meme, an evolutionary biologist might say-the cultural version of a gene. It passes from generation to generation, evolving as it goes, till every clumsy or extraneous line is stripped away: "Oh, the cuckoo she's a pretty bird/She sings as she flies/She brings us glad tidings/And tells us no lies." You only have to hear it a few times to know it by heart.
Burkhard Bilger
Posted by amin at May 1, 2008 12:15 AM