There is something very special, almost magical, about traditional folk songs.
They exist everywhere and nowhere. They’re instantly recognizable, often very catchy, and they float around in the public domain, passed down from generation to generation by their sheer ubiquity.
Baa Baa Black Sheep. Three Blind Mice. Hot Cross Buns. You’ve known the words and melodies for so long, they’re as familiar as your family’s faces.
For some reason, the French seem to be extra good at this. With their Alouettes and their Frère Jacques, they’ve managed to create cultural earworms that can get stuck in the heads of those who don’t even speak the language.
“À La Claire Fontaine,” which has been around for at least 400 years, stands out among traditional folk tunes because rather than being funny or silly, it’s mournful, thoughtful, and especially in this version, beautiful.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. As with many traditional songs, the lyrics can carry just about any meaning you want them to. It could be a young woman pining for a lost love as she sits by a clear fountain. It could be a French-Canadian grieving the lost connection to his motherland after the British invasion of Quebec in 1759, as he sits next to the ‘clear fountain’ that is the St. Lawrence River. The listener is free to project their own nostalgia, mourning, or tears onto the song.
2. The melody in the voice is pentatonic, and in a major key. But the accompanying piano descends chromatically, and it gives a sharply tragic edge to the child-like simplicity of the vocal line.
3. The singer, Genevoise, is a mystery to me. I can’t find much trace of her online, and anything I can find shows no actual images of her. Her social media presence seems to have been created only to promote the fact that this track was used in the 2017 documentary (which, by the way, is excellent) called “Icarus.”
It’s kind of perfect, actually: the person who created this lovely recording of this lovely traditional folk song seems to be as ethereal and untraceable as…most traditional folk songs.
Recommended listening activity:
Disappearing into the fog.