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Top 10 Folk Songs That Will Never Be Written
// article by Beverley

It seems that lately folk music is going all kinds of places: I recently heard a folk cover of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" theme song and a folk version of an order at Taco Bell! But there are a few directions I don't think folk will ever take, and here they are. (Of course, who knows? Maybe the folk artists will take this as a challenge rather than a limit!)

10. "Summer of Zombies"

Another great theme in folk music is love and nostalgia of nature. Nothing bring back nostalgia like summer with its sandy beaches, quiet country cottages surrounded by wildflowers, old and new friends, and gory zombie attacks. This is a great song to remember your favourite zombie attacks to.
9. "The Ballad of Black Eye Henry the Magical Octopus"

The folk genre is known for its foreboding ballads of sad or dangerous events ("Shankill Butchers" by The Decemberists being a good example) — and this is no exception! This is the story of a young man who avenges his love by hunting down Black Eye Henry, a legendary magical octopus who will haunt your dreams!
8. "100 Years"

The 1960s yielded a broad collection of anti-war songs, but never has there been an anti-war song after the fact. This song rages about the spillage of blood that took place between 1337 and 1453 in order to decide who should take the French throne. A moving tale about aristocrats embroiled in a fruitless struggle for power.
7. "Nvr luv agn."

This is a rather short piece, but probably the saddest song you will ever hear about a person being dumped by text message and the ensuing heartache. Written in the style of a literal transcription, the short snippets of illiterate gibberish deliver a concise package of emotion that explodes upon impact.
6. "Beautiful Estonia"

Nostalgia and wonder are the fabric of folk, and nothing brings them out more than imagery from a mysterious foreign country. We see this motif in "Brazilian Sun" and "Tahitian Love Songs" by CocoRosie, This song makes a flailing attempt at coaxing that nostalgia but instead decays into a rant about the lack of running water and electricity, not to mention bad hotel service. Not the magical experience we were hoping for.
5. "A Quack In Your Story"

This song is about a young woman who believes she is being betrayed, as she suspects her husband is cheating on her with a rubber duck. She faces with desperation the decision to either say farewell to her lifelong love, stand up to him and set him straight, or except for ever that there will always be another woman... er, duck,
4. "The Day You Were Born"

This piece is a love song a man wrote for his newborn daughter. In an effort to describe the magical feeling of the day of his daughter's birth, the father fruitlessly rambles about the normal, everyday events of the delivering of the newspaper and the toasting of toast. A story of Guthrie-like length and depth, this song will touch your heart for the first ten minutes.
3. "This Magical Holy Day"

In an effort to catch the magic of the season, the artist has taken a Christmas sermon from the Rosemead California Lutheran Church and set it to soft classical guitar, bells, and sound collage of children laughing and playing. It would have truly encapsulated the magic of the holiday, had they removed a hateful homophobic rant midway through the sermon.
2. "Wool Cap"

This song is mainly instrumental with a medley of wintery sounds like blowing winds and crunching snowy footsteps. The song is a pretty typical piece, with one quirk: accompanying the music is strange chanting "Knit, pearl, knit, pearl." If you follow the chant while knitting, you will actually produce a pretty cool wool cap! Could this be the future of folk crafts?
1. "Together At The House On Donnelly"

Folk songs frequently revolve around symbols and have layered meanings, almost like dreams. To the uninitiated, this song might just sound like a nostalgic story about a group of friends sharing an old broken-down house together. Some have posited this song has a deeper, darker meaning, and is really about a crack house. If you do your research though, "The House on Donnelly" was a nickname for an old mental institution, Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Arizona. With that information you can easily trace back the song and determine which characters mentioned had which mental illnesses, but the final line, "Now time has passed, and I'm feeling better, but I miss all my old friends at the house," suggests that the narrator has been cured and perhaps all the characters mentioned were merely multiple personalities or hallucinations brought on by psychosis.


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