- Songs & Stories
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- Songs & Stories
- Songs & Stories
- …
- Songs & Stories
The tradition of Maysinging
by Astrid Selling, folksinger and folkmusician from Sweden
So what is then May singing? Who participates and how is it done? May singing is, summed up as a tradition in southern Sweden (the landscapes that used to belong to Denmark), that you go out together after dark on the Walborg night (30th of April). You walk with a basket from farm to farm and sing a special song – The Maysong.
The tune has the form of a medieval ballad with fore singing and after singing (chorus, omkväde in Swedish), and with a large number of verses, which are chosen by the lead singer at the moment. For the effort, the ”sjungare” (sjungare is an informal/dialiect word that is used for the participants. Not ”sångare”, which is the formal or proper word for a singer in Swedish) primarily want eggs or money, drink and other goodies.
The May songs constitute a unique body of material in the archives. They really show the tradition's diversity and breadth in variants, despite the fact that it is such a limited custom, i.e. once a year and basically only one song. But, there are lots of different verses and there are lots of melodic variations, which could roughly be divided into three types of melodic structures, with supposed different ages. But melody variants and verse variants differ from village to village. "This is how the May song went" really only describes how it was sung in a small area, in a village. The archival material for this particular tradition shows that it is not possible to say that there was a specific song, or even five or ten variants of the song. It is so much more multifaceted than that. On the one hand, you come across variants when you move and settle in another village, on the other hand, a village can suddenly start using new verses based on a text they received from a parent or because they found new verses they like better. But above all, the song changes in the very moment when it is sung.
Talented May singers build a drama based on what happens at that particular house then and there. A May song consists of different categories of verses. It always begins with a verse like this:
Goafton ni som hemma är
I afton så vilja vi gästa här
Eng: Good evening, you who are at home. This evening we’d like to be your guestThen there may be a series of verses describing the Spring. "Reserve verses" or backup verses, they were called in the village of Strångamåla:
Och lärkan spelar och göken han gal
Och löven de spricka utur sina skal
Eng: And the lark is playing and the cuckoo bird is crowing And the leaves are bursting out of their shellsReserve verses have the function of waking up those you sing to. Sometimes it can take a while and then it's good to be able to sing for a long time. Then they sing about the eggs:
Låt hönan värpa ägg på fat
Till pannekaka och äggamat
Eng: Let the hen lay eggs on a plate, for pancakes and egg food.These verses are giving a hint about what will happen when the night singing is over. They also sing about if you can't get any eggs, money and the "black bottle" are just as good.
Now it's up to the lead singer to pay attention, because if you notice that there's movement in the house, a light is turned on in the kitchen, someone
opens a window or a door, the lead singer leaves the verses about nature and the eggs and instead chooses:
Nu hör vi mor uppå golvet gå
Hon letar efter äggen i var everliga vrå
Eng: Now we can hear mother walking on the floor, she is looking for eggs in all the corners of the house.And then you sing about father and then a verse where you give thanks for the great gift. Here it is important that the lead singer has an eye on the farm's inhabitants. If you know, for example, that the man in the house has passed away, you will skip the verse about father. And when you have received your gifts and are satisfied, you sing the last verse that describes what you are doing:
Nu vänder vi uppå er gård Och kommer igen till nästa årEng: We are now turning in your yard and will comeback next year
And you don't stop singing until you get far enough away. It is often described how the singers used to wander off singing into the night.
I would like to compare May singing to Christmas celebrations. In the way that you think that everyone celebrates exactly the same, but in fact the celebrations are only similar and what seems to be completely in harmony is that they happen at the same time, on Christmas Eve. This points to what is significant for a living tradition; that it has its own life, like a stream that sometimes changes its course. It goes about the same from time to time, but not exactly. The perspective we have is from within and is rarely looking outward. We usually assume that everyone else is doing the same thing.
Maysinging is almost always described as a Danish custom, which we then kept in the old Danish landscapes, but when in the years 2011-2014 I managed the folk music project Baltic Sea Inter Cult with young people and folk musicians in Estonia, Poland and Sweden, I had the chance to cover more aspects of the custom, which apparently was wide spread. There is a type of may song called "pievisor" and there are records in Scania (Skåne) that describe how the Pievisa was sung. The pievisa is the Maysong in a format that broadly looks like the Maysong, but is about when the Virgin Mary gives birth to Jesus and then loses him in the temple. One could describe the pievisa as a quick version of the New Testament performed in 15-20 verses. Early scholars believe that this is a Scanian tradition, but there are actually fragments of a pievisa from the Karlshamn region in Blekinge. We sing it today by supplementing with verses recorded in Scania. But it is also the same song that is the basis of Alice Tegnér's Goder morgon/Goder afton (a christmas song sung nowadays by children at Lucia). And just these songs; pievisan and goder afton have also been used at Christmas, but are then recorded in the north of the country. It is a custom that describes the central story of Christmas, but both at Christmas and in May.
The pievisa from Blekinge begins:
God morgon härinne, både kvinna och man
Husbonden, matmodern vara lustig och glad
Eng: Good morning in here, both man and woman
Father of the house, mother of the house be joyful and happyThis was something I thought about a lot when the Baltic Sea Inter Cult project took me to Poland and the Suwalki region. In Poland, which is Catholic, you can find plenty of crucifixes at the crossroads. After 1990, many were renovated, so today they are fairly new, but you can come across a few that are older. The crosses are especially important in May, when they become the focal point of May celebrations. Every Friday during May, people go to the village's roadside crucifix to perform the only custom connected to the church that can be performed without a priest. The girls put flower wreaths in their hair and the crucifix is dressed with flowers and leaves. You sing and you bring out the picnic basket. To my question what they sing about, my Polish folk music friends explained that they sing about the Virgin Mary and Jesus. So a form of pievisa. In 1579, the month of May officially became the Virgin Mary's own month in the Catholic Church. So that is when her great deed, giving birth to Jesus, should be celebrated.
This custom with the pievisa remained in use in Skåne and Blekinge right into the early 20th century. In order to understand how you could sing about eggs, maidens who get pregnant and the Virgin Mary in the same tune, I had to puzzle my way through various records.This is my interpretation: May singing involves several parts. To walk from farm to farm, to walk up to a farm and sing to wake up the farm people, and then beg for eggs, money and drinks and maybe sing out the farm's daughters or maids, who will then come along on the walk. And as usual, you got something to eat and sometimes even a schnaps while standing. This means that there were quite a few stops in the singing. You didn't sing all the time. And this is where I think the song about the Virgin Mary has come in. As a tribute to the farm people, when you got something to eat and drink, you sang the Pievisan as an honorable thanks. After that they wandered away to the final verses.
In the summer of 2022, I traveled to Latvia with the first phase of the project Kuldrum – storytelling around the Baltic Sea. We traveled to Courland (Kurzeme) and then had the opportunity to meet Lidija Jansone, who has a cultural association on her family farm in Suiti, a small area in Courland that is historically Catholic and surrounded by the protestant Latvia, and has received UNESCO cultural heritage status.
It was not easy to find Lidija's farm. Suiti consists of sparsely located houses and only sand roads. There are no road signs, instead you have to know by which rock to turn off the main road. But we became clearly aware that we had entered the area when we were greeted by a Madonna statuette in a glass case at the first road crossing. Lidija
showed how she today uses the farm to tell the family's story, where war and forced exile to Siberia have been part of life. But above all, she has courses in costume sewing, crafts and the traditions they want to keep alive. Lidija had a lot to tell and I had to wait a long time before I finally got the chance to ask about Maysinging:
- Of course we sing May by the Madonna at the crossroads, answered Lidija.Then she offered us the picnic food you always bring to the crossroads on May Day; a kind of mini carrot pie, chicory coffee and Rigabalsam.
- Do you sing? I asked.- Yes, of course.
- What are you singing about?
- About the Virgin Mary and the birth of Jesus, of course. You know why, right?
And I could proudly answer her:
- Because May is the Virgin Mary's own month.
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