Robert's Raves

The Music of Story
by Robert Rodriguez

uring the 1960s renaissance of fantasy literature, one of the more interesting and enduring characters that captured the imagination of lovers of this genre was the figure known as Wandering John, also John the Balladeer, a creation of the late Appalachian fantasy writer Manly Wade Wellman. In toto, seventeen short stories and nearly half a dozen novels would be written in which John took center stage. John was a folksinger, storyteller, and lecturer who wandered his beloved southern mountains with his silver-strung guitar as his only constant companion. John loved to sing the old ballads and tell the old tales, but his guitar was also a strong agent in the fight against evil and chaos, wherever it was encountered (silver of course being a counter-balance to the forces of darkness and mayhem). Wellman would be but one of many writers who would skillfully integrate the realms of music and storytelling in their various literary creations, writers who would include the likes of Jane Yolen, Charles de Lint, Mercedes Lackey, Pamela Deane, Lloyd Alexander, Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, and Ellen Kushner. Musicians, both vocal and instrumental, took center stage as active heroes and heroines, and the use of traditional music in telling original tales soon became quite prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic.

But as Josepha Sherman so cogently put it in Once Upon a Galaxy, modern fantasy and science fiction owes as much to the oral past as to its own creators and adherents. The vast realm of folklore, myth, legend, and traditional story is filled with examples of folk narratives where music plays a major and central role in the plot and development of numerous tales. In the ancient cycle of songs from Finland known as the Kalevala, it is told that Vainemoinen, the first man in Finland brought the first harp to Finland to make music. The harp-like kantele is Finland’s national instrument and is often referred to as Vainemoinen’s gift to the Finns. Such was the power of his music that in one story even the sun and moon descended from the sky in order to hear it. This allowed the wicked Louhi, mistress of Pojola, to kidnap both and imprison them within her dark mountain fortress. Only a clever smith’s trick was able to free them to return heavenward. According to a Romany (gypsy) legend from Hungary, the devil gave the gypsies their first fiddle, in part due to the behavior of a thoughtless and haughty young girl. Such is the spell of a gypsy’s fiddle that it can cause joy and sorrow to mingle with one another, causing one to weep, laugh, dance, and rejoice in successive turns.

In Vietnam they tell a tale of a poor peasant who once saved the life of a fox, who was nothing less than one of the blessed celestials in disguise. In return for his help, the celestial gave the peasant a small, delicate instrument, the butterfly harp, so called because of its bell-like and sweet tones. With it, the peasant was able to make the emperor’s only daughter laugh and smile for the first time in her life. The grateful emperor gave his daughter to the peasant for his wife, made the young man his heir, and promptly went fishing for the rest of his life. According to Vietnamese tradition, the butterfly harp has been that country’s national instrument ever since.

All across the world, stories exist which tell of the origin and beginnings of numerous musical instruments in various locales: the guitar in Mexico, the charango in Bolivia, the bagpipe in Macedonia, the saz in Turkey, the kayagum in Korea, the biwa in Japan, and a host of others.

Musical instruments can, and often do, have a magic and power all their own, and can induce any number of reactions and emotional and physical responses. In the tale of Orfeo, a British version of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the queen is kidnapped by the Faerie folk and Orfeo must enter their realm to rescue her. So wondrously does he play upon his harp (in some versions it is a bagpipe) that the elfin monarch grants any wish Orfeo may make. Orfeo demands the release of his queen and returns to the world of mortal kind. The Russian tale of the Lute-player tells a similar story, although in this case, it is a czar’s wife, disguised as a male musician, who is able to win the release of her imprisoned spouse from an enemy ruler through her wonderful musicianship. But just as an instrument can please and bring joy and happiness, it can also frighten and repel. There is a Breton ballad which tells how a clever fellow once trapped the devil by tying him to a tree and then forcing him to endure many hours of the strident sounds of the oboe-like bombarde, a traditional Breton instrument. Eventually the devil managed to get away, but not before he almost went deaf. He has hated music from then on, and no longer shows his face in Brittany. (It is said, however, that he does often make an appearance among Parisians.)

In the Mexican tale of Salina and El Sombreron, the demon with the hat, a guitar made from the wood of a tree that has grown upon hallowed ground and played by a young women who has never known a man is crucial in the heroine’s eventual salvation and the devil’s stark defeat.

In Norway, there is a common type of narrative known as the troll ballad. In one such tale, a farmer cleverly manages to save his only daughter from becoming the unwilling wife of a wicked troll by so skillfully playing his hardanger fiddle that is ensnares the troll, causing him to forget all around him, including the passage of time. Before the troll knows what has happened, he is turned to stone by the sudden rising of the sun. In another tale from Quebec, the fiddle is also a young man’s salvation. He is about to be hung, but in a moment of sporting jest, his judges and executioners tell him that if he can play a tune no one has ever heard before, he will be freed. The night before his execution, the devil visits him and tells him that come the next morning, he shall amaze his executioners and save his own life. To the amazement of those gathered at the gallows, the young man plays a tune that is unknown to all, thus calling the bluff of those who condemned him and winning his freedom. This, according to tradition, is the origin of the popular tune known in French Canada as "The Hangman’s Reel." Whether the devil ever got the young man’s soul in the end is not known.

The tale of the musician who is given an instrument that, when played, makes its hearers begin to dance without the ability to stop is known throughout the world. There are version and variants of this tale told in Nova Scotia and Quebec, the southern U.S., England, Ireland, France, Sweden, Russia, Poland, Greece, central Asia and even the Pacific Islands. In a story from the Venetia region of northern Italy, a young man, the youngest of three brothers, is given a whistle by two mysterious sisters. The whistle causes all and sundry to dance without stopping. Eventually the young man is not only able to save his two older brothers, but also win great fortune, a king’s daughter, and a kingdom to boot. In a well-known tale from southern England, an entire wedding party was punished by the devil himself, disguised as a fiddler, when they would not stop making merry and dancing on a Sunday. First Old Nick made them dance for hours without stopping; then he turned the entire gathering into a set of standing stones, which, according to tradition, can still be seen in the small town of Stanton Drew in Somerset. In a French variation of the theme of the devil at the dance, a hitherto lack-luster fiddler is given demonic powers by a stranger, and when he begins to play his fiddle, everyone begins to dance and cannot stop until a local priest intervenes to banish the presence of evil. When he does, the fiddler vanishes in a puff of smoke, presumably to his hellish afterlife, leaving only the definite smell of brimstone to pervade the air of the parish hall.

Even members of the animal kingdom manage to get into the act where music is concerned. There is, of course, the well-known tale of the cat, rooster, dog and donkey who ran away from their masters to become musicians in the city of Bremen, and how they found a house filled with robber’s loot, and settled down to live quite comfortably for the remainder of their days. In an intriguing variant of the well-known legend of the piper of Hamelin, there is the tale from England of a strange piper who removed all the rats and related rodents from the town of Frenchville with subsequent events that led to his fearful retribution upon the town’s inhabitants for their refusal to pay him as they had promised. In a tale from Mongolia it is told that the first exponent of the huur, an instrument somewhat akin to the fiddle, was not a human being, but a magical, flying horse who used this instrument to save his herd from capture by greedy and vile hunters. And then there is the Irish tale of Jack and how he once purchased a bee who could play the harp, and a dancing mouse and bumclock. With these marvelous creatures in his possession, he was able to make the king of Ireland’s daughter laugh three times, and thus won her to wife and became king himself. In Finland there are numerous tales about the roguish fox known as Mikko. In one of these, Mikko engages in a contest with a demonic cat, in which both must play both the fiddle and the kantlere-harp before the king himself. Mikko eventually wins the contest, and so impressed is the king that he makes Mikko his prime minister, to the delight of all foxes in Finland.

Music and its wonders have even managed to insinuate themselves into the much larger panorama of history. There is the medieval Polish legend of how a certain trumpet melody known as the hejnal was able to save the city of Krakow from a Tartar invasion, and which, centuries later and half a world away, would help fulfill a strange prophecy. According to tradition, the night before the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the Scottish host regaled the English forces with an impromptu concert of highland pipe music, which, it is said, sounded to the frightened English host as if all the demons in hell had been turned loose and all the tortured souls in creation were crying for mercy. In 1664, when New Amsterdam was taken over by the British and became New York, tradition says that a young trumpeter named Anthony should have warned the good Dutch burghers of the approach of the British fleet, but could not because he was involved in an aquatic race with the devil. Because the race occurred in a treacherous section of the Hudson River, the name of the place from that day to this has been known as Speiten-Deivel to recall that strange day. Then there is the amusing tale of how a solo piper, totally naked save for a covering of woad all over his body, stopped an entire British army in its tracks as they marched through the highlands in 1746 soon after the defeat of the Scottish army at Culloden. In March of 1836, the besieged defenders of Alamo heard, before the charge of the Mexican army, the haunting and demonic sound of the melody known as the Deguello, a melody which told those who heard it that no quarter would be given, no prisoners taken. Forty years later, another famous charge would be made at a site on the Little Big Horn River. On that Sunday afternoon in June, 1876, as Colonel Custer’s five regiments of the Seventh Calvary swept over the ridge that would bear his name, the company tune, "Gary Owens," sounded with defiance and pride as over two hundred men rode to meet their appointment with history and destiny.

There are, as well, tales in which the power of the human voice plays a central role, a power that can charm, anger, distress, or make joyous the hearts and souls of others. Some singers have taken on a folk persona of their own, such as renowned Abu Ishak of the Arabian Nights and the Romany-gypsy singer known as Janoczek, about whom dozens of tales exist. In other tales, music is used in regular or repetitive patterns, tales such as "the Cat and the Mouse" or "Little Dickey Wigburn," the type of story referred to as cantefables. And there are other tales, such as those involving how music came to certain places and cultures, and stories of such individual instruments such as courting flutes, drums, and even more unusual and exotic music makers.

Manly Wade Wellman, author of the Wandering John stories, has been dead for over a decade, but it does not seem too far-fetched to believe that the spirit of John still wanders the southern mountains, playing his enchanted guitar, singing his beloved old ballads, and telling his wondrous tales to all who care to listen. Perhaps, when all is said and done, a Welsh proverb says it best, "may all those who truly feel the magic of song and story possess the spirit of the harp, the gift of song and story, and a heart full of love, wisdom, and understanding."

—published in WIP Summer 1999

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