As some of you may know, I am German although I have been living in the UK for almost twenty years now. I guess I was fortunate in that I grew up in a family with a fair amount of music making and singing, even though I showed little if any aptitude in either singing or playing an instrument when I was young. I was even more fortunate in that I was exposed to German folk music in one of its few palatable incarnations, as homemade acoustic music rather than the absolutely terrifying public faces of Volksmusik as either oompah music or cheese-as-cheese-can folk-tinged Schlager music (think the most sentimental type of Nashville C&W and multiply by a hundred). Thus, even though I have gone through extensive periods of infatuation with British, Irish and American folk and traditional music -- and more recently Italian and Greek -- I have always had a soft spot for traditional German folk songs. Unfortunately, there are very few recordings of this type of music in a setting that doesn't set my teeth on edge. Looking through Youtube, for example, one sees that most folk song settings are either choral arrangements, piano/voice Lieder in the Schubert/Brahms tradition, or the above-mentioned unspeakables.
That is not how I learned these songs. Through my parents (who in turn followed from my grandparents in this respect), I was exposed to the values of the early 20th century Wandervogel, a back-to-nature youth movement centred around outdoor living, rambling and folk music. Their instruments of choice for folk song accompaniments were the guitar and the mandolin, and the seminal song book of the Wandervogel was the Zupfgeigenhansl, first published in 1908, containing 250 or so traditional songs. My mother owns several original copies and I have got a very well-preserved copy of the rare 1914 guitar-and-vocal edition (previously owned by my late aunt). A full scan of a later (1920) edition is available as free download in PDF format from the web site of the Dusseldorf University Library at this link (click on "Download"):
Zupfgeigenhansl 1920 Edition
I should say that my own 1914 copy is in much better condition than this scanned library book, and also has fully arranged guitar parts for every song rather than just chord symbols. For those who are confused by the lack of song titles in the book, there is a peculiar convention that German folk songs don't have titles as such but rather are referred to by the first line of the lyrics.
Yesterday, I sat down with my copy of the book and picked a few songs on my Mid-Missouri that I like the tunes of, some of which I knew either from my parents or from recordings, but most that I learned from the book itself. Some are well-known in Germany, others now very obscure. All of these are just the melody lines, exactly as written in the Zupfgeigenhansl, occasionally with a tiny bit of double-stopping, and generally very short. I have played each tune twice through, and most are around a minute or so. I have made no attempt at arranging or ornamenting the tunes -- these are simple folk melodies and in my view work best if left simple. This isn't meant to be some sort of best-of: I just skipped through part of the book and played what I fancied. I got about a third of the way through (pages 1-25 and 146-192, to be precise), so there may well be an update soon of tunes from the rest of the book.
Here are Youtube videos of 24 of these songs:
Ich hab die Nacht geträumet
Mein Schatz, der ist auf die Wanderschaft hin
Es dunkelt schon in der Heide
Ich hebbe se nich up de Scholen gebracht
Wo gehst Du hin, Du Stolze?
Ach Gott, wie weh tut Scheiden
Es geht eine dunkle Wolk herein
Gut Gsell, und Du musst wandern
Da droben auf jenem Berge
Es ritten drei Reiter zum Tore hinaus
Ade zur guten Nacht
Morgen will mein Schatz verreisen
Es sass ein Käterlein auf dem Dach
Mir ist ein schöns brauns Maidelein
Bin i net a lustiger Fuhrmannsbue
Es wohnte eine Müllerin
Als ich ein jung Geselle war (Tod von Basel)
Wie schön blüht uns der Maien
Ich ging durch einen grasgrünen Wald
Der Winter ist vergangen
I bin a Steirabua
In stiller Nacht zur ersten Wacht
Stehn zwei Stern am hohen Himmel
Martin
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