Essay: “If I were a Blackbird”: constellations of meaning in birdsong and folksong
This essay was published in the collection Per Scribendum, Sumus: Ethnopoesis, Or: Writing Heritage celebrating the work, friendships and academic achievements of Máiréad Nic Craith.
![‘In the Garden’ Blackbird print by artist Jenny Sturgeon, Shetland [8]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/554a4780e4b046069e1d04e6/1609581549602-Z7SCGOH6YRUZ4163H8QE/Blackbird.sturgeon.jpg)
‘In the Garden’ Blackbird print by artist Jenny Sturgeon, Shetland [8]
For Máiréad Nic Craith, with Love
Because they have song,
not because they have answers,
is why the birds sing.[1]
Last April I attended a rainy-day ‘nature awareness’ workshop on bird songs and calls in Abriachan, where I now live, in the hills on the north side of Loch Ness.[2] On a verdant walk up through the woods from the loch, we learned together how to pay attention, how to listen, how to begin to recognise each species. This has now become a daily ritual for me; pausing to listen to the chorus of the birds draws me out of my conscious mind into the here and now. Just for a moment, the mental chatter stops and I feel overcome with a sense of peace, of belonging, a sense of being.
One of the first things I did when moving to our new home was to set up a bird feeder outside the kitchen window. As I am writing this, there is a blackbird pecking at the earth, eating the seeds tossed to the ground by the blue tits, great tits and families of finches. Glossy black with its bright yellow bill, I have formed an intimate relationship with this morning blackbird; its daily visit has become intertwined with my breakfast ritual of tea and porridge. The birds and their rhythms have become ecologically bound up with my own experience of, and companionship with, this new place.
Birds, of course, have captured the collective and poetic imagination throughout the ages. The blackbird is no different: this common and conspicuous species has given rise to a number of literary and cultural references and often appears in folk symbolism. The first part of this essay, then, reflects on how we relate to the sounds of birds - how we ‘make sense’ of our aesthetic experiences. The second takes the blackbird as a metaphor and motif in folksong, reflecting on how - through the process of tradition - our individual experiences can become distilled into a collective and creative constellation of meanings.
A Celebration of Being
Perhaps the most intimate and joyful creative expression of how people relate to the sounds of birds is in their imitation by humans – in speech, whistling, music, and song. Countless generations before our time had a far more intimate relationship with nature and the ecological rhythms on which our life depends. For example, in a track found on the online archive Tobar an Dualchais – Kist O Riches, recorded on reel-to-reel by Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson in Fife in 1964, you can hear a selection of whistled bird-call imitations (with impressive technique!) of the cuckoo, curlew, owl and the blackbird.[3] Another magical track is a recording of Annie Johnson from Barra, in the Outer Hebrides, sharing the Cainnt nan Eun or ‘speech of the birds’ in Gaelic, recorded by J. L. Campbell on wax cylinder in 1950.[4] Through the creative use of language, she imitates and celebrates the smeòrach (thrush), uiseag (lark), feannag (crow), faoileag (seagull) and calman (dove). Here, as musicologist John Purser reflects, the ‘the dividing lines between birdsong, music and speech are impossible to determine.’[5]
Musing upon the questions of singing, presence and being, Irish philosopher William Desmond reflects,[6]
“Compare a singing being with something inanimate. The wind blows around a bush and makes a whirr or a low burr, but neither the wind or bush properly sings. But a bird chirps, a thrush sings out again and again a line of lush notes, and we sense a presence there that was not manifest before.
Something is coming awake in singing life…Song is a witness of affirming presence...The bird’s song is an unselfconscious, effortless, celebration of being.”
The song of the blackbird is perhaps the most familiar and best-loved song to be heard in any garden, park or woodland. Their call is influenced by the seasons, the weather and changing light. Their stark calls at wintertime roost are very much characteristic of long, dark, cold days; in spring, their spontaneously composed song marks the coming of freshness and new life. The spontaneity of the blackbird’s song was once proverbial: ‘to whistle like a blackbird’ was to do something with ease. Ornithologist William Henry Hudson believed that the ‘careless beauty’ of the blackbird’s song ‘comes nearer to human music than any other bird songs,’ while the tone was ‘even suggestive of the human voice.’[7]
Metaphor and Music
At the workshop I attended in Abriachan, we learned how to identify bird sounds by various ‘attributes’, such as duration, pace, volume, pitch, pattern and rhythm. I find it fascinating how people use language to make sense of these sounds, often using the same kind of language we would use to describe music and song. The blackbird’s song has been described variously as ‘rich, fluid and melodious’, ‘relaxed’, ‘cheerful and upbeat’ and ‘fluent and beautifully fluted.’ It was suggested that each ‘verse’ of the blackbird’s song ends with ‘a twiddle of high squeaky notes, like the opening of a rusty gate.’ Some people even create mnemonics to aid their memory, such as ‘rusty rusty hinge squeak!’
What, then, is the relationship between our embodied experience and perception, and the language we use to express it? Using language like this is an example of the creative process of metaphorical thinking - of thinking of one thing in terms of another. Ordinary definition describes metaphor as a ‘figure of speech’ or literary device in which a word or phrase helps make a comparison. There is abundant evidence, however, to suggest that metaphor is not simply a manifestation of literary creativity, but rather a ‘fundamental mechanism of mind’ essential to the fundamental workings of language and how humans ‘make sense’ of the world around them.[9] That is to say, metaphors are so deeply embedded in our consciousness that they often go unnoticed.
We need to make the distinction here between ‘conceptual metaphors’, which are patterns of thought, and ‘linguistic metaphors’, which are the expression of thought in language. Philosopher Mark Johnson, drawing on research in cognitive science, makes the case that conceptual metaphors are grounded firstly in our bodily experience, and that it is only through our bodily perceptions, movements, senses and emotions that meaning becomes possible. Shape and colour, taste, movement in time and space – all of these are perceived by the senses, and the signification of these senses through language is the basis upon which conceptions of cultural forms such as music and song are formed.[10] We talk of music being ‘high’ or ‘low’ which speaks to our orientation in space; we describe it as dark or light, fast or slow, sharp or sweet. We might say we are ‘deeply moved’ by a song, which suggests a kind of journey or transformation.
This is all to say, Johnson argues, that all aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic.[11] The word ‘aesthetic’ is understood here not in the sense of a matter of beauty, judgement or taste, but rather – as opposed to the anaesthetic experience – as one in which our senses are operating at their peak, when we are present in the current moment with heightened awareness, when we are most fully alive. Philosopher of music Arnold Berleant writes,[12]
“Aesthetic embodiment is being fully present through the distinctive presence of the body with the sensory focus and intensity we associate with the experience of art. It is being most completely human.”
The Pattern that Connects
Most scientific writing about the sound of the birds attempts to objectify sounds into ‘the song’ or ‘the call’, transcribing and categorising the various sonic properties and then performing a systematic or comparative analysis. Such systematic analysis of an isolated aesthetic object, however, does not explain how or why such sounds become evocative, affecting or meaningful to people.
As part of a research project investigating how people perceive, identify and ‘make sense’ of bird sounds, anthropologist Andrew Whitehouse suggests that birds, for some people, are not just integral to a ‘sense of place’ but to a sense of being.[13] Birds, he writes, are important to people ‘because of their very presence.’ The dynamic presence of birds entangles with people’s lives and worlds and the changes, constancies and ecological rhythms within it. A sense of being is both aesthetic and affective, and listening to the birds becomes the focal point to a whole bodily experience of the landscape. Meaning emerges in-between our ongoing, multi-sensory experience of the world and the personal or historical narratives that these experiences recall and elicit.
For me, in these late days of spring, the early morning wake-up call at dawn is mixed with the sensation of being awoken by the soft rising sun and the light peeking through the gaps. In the calming chorus at dusk, the spring song of the birds mixes with the scent of damp, freshly-greened branches, wild cherry blossom, the opening buds of the poplar tree and a sense of the gradual fading of the light. As I come to know this place, high in the hills overlooking the changing textures and colours of the waters of Loch Ness, the sounds of the birds are very much entangled with my experience of this landscape.
I find anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s own definition of ‘aesthetic’ useful here. He understands aesthetics as a form of ‘ecological understanding.’ He writes, ‘…so by aesthetic I mean responses to the pattern which connects.’ [14] He describes aesthetic thinking as a ‘sensibility’, as an ‘ability to perceive connections, commonalities, shared properties between different elements of reality and different levels of reality, at different levels of abstraction.’ Such a sensibility has to do with conscious awareness, attention and care. To see wholeness – to see the patterns of relatedness and the interconnectedness of things – is a view that goes together with a recognition of the diversity of life and the uniqueness of its individual manifestations, which are each seen to have intrinsic value even in their most insignificant forms.
Aesthetic Encounters
As an ethnologist, I am most fascinated by heightened aesthetic encounters and the emergent, creative processes of meaning-making that such encounters elicit. The initial multi-sensory experience is not the end of the encounter; rather, these ‘moments’ of experience can inspire further reflection and can hold the potential and possibility for transforming, re-framing or affirming our relationship to the world. For me, these ‘moments’ most often come in musical experience, although more and more often I find these experiences in the natural world.
One such moment I can recall is the performance of the piece ‘Blackbird,’ sung by Scots singer Fiona Hunter during the live orchestral performance of musician and composer Martyn Bennett’s work GRIT at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival in 2016.[15] Hunter was singing in tribute to the original recording of the song ‘What A Voice (Blackbird)’ sung by Traveller singer Lizzie Higgins (1929 - 1993)[16], recorded in 1977 and sampled by Bennett on his original studio album.[17] Here, the free, unmetered voice, intuitive and free-flowing, stood out as starkly elemental against a rigid drum beat, with exquisite strings soaring over the top. The tension between freedom and form in this case made for a powerful emotional release, producing a full visceral response of spine-tingles and chills. This was a musical event that invoked a context much larger than the immediate performance context itself: it self-consciously embodied and invoked all pre-existing moments in the tradition, giving voice to those no longer with us. It was a performance that somehow fused the lived present with the past, opening up worlds of memory and imagination.
On a very personal level, this is music that has become woven in with my own personal narrative, and the multi-sensory experience of listening to this music evokes for me multiple layers of meaning and memory. The album GRIT was released in 2003, the year I began my undergraduate degree in Scottish ethnology at the University of Edinburgh. It is the soundtrack to my early twenties, forever bound up with that time, people and place. A friend commented,[18]
“What is the emotion you experience when you listen to Blackbird? I find it so difficult to put the emotion into words. Maybe it doesn’t matter that I can’t put into words. Maybe that’s the beauty, the mystery. But it’s the emotion that makes you want to laugh and cry with joy and misery and regret and makes you look back and look forwards all at once.”
It is often difficult to express or describe the full meaning or emotion of such significant aesthetic experiences in everyday language. This is why we often reach for poetic language, for creative metaphor, to help us ‘make sense’ of the world. Metaphor is an abstraction of lived experience into language: it has poetic power precisely because it reconnects abstract thought with our embodied encounters.
A wonderfully rich example of creative ‘thinking by metaphor’ is the idea of the elusive duende – an abstract poetic metaphor in the Spanish language that reaches to make sense of both the heightened expression of and emotion in response to art, most often associated with traditional song and dance. The poet Federico García Lorca wrote that the duende is ‘the mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained,’ ‘drawing close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression.’[19] Such explanations of the duende, of course, appealed to Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson as an idea that contained all that he found difficult to express about the inexpressible and elemental qualities of traditional folk culture.[20] Henderson noted that in Scotland, the Travellers have an expression that corresponds with the duende: this is the idea of the conyach, a word which attempts to describe the visceral creative power of the unaccompanied human voice in song.[21]
The quality and materiality of Lizzie Higgin’s unaccompanied voice, mentioned earlier in this essay, has a powerful affect on many people. With its particular aesthetic of simplicity and directness, her voice embodies the elusive quality of being at once ancient and immediately present, something instantly recognisable yet unrecognisable, something that most of us are now somehow cut off from. On hearing her voice for the first time, composer Martyn Bennett said this: [22]
“I first heard Lizzie sing when I was about 12 years of age, at a festival in the North East of Scotland. She was the only singer that actually made me stop, and the hairs got me on the back of the neck, you know? There’s just something about her voice. It’s like something wild, something that is not trained at all, it’s just an instinct. She just sang straight out of her soul. ”
Desmond writes that song can sometimes ‘rise up’ from sources of being ‘where the calculating, controlling will not does not hold sway.’ Using similar language to Bennett, he reflects,[23]
“Listening to the old ballads we sometimes here the elemental – so simple, so elegant, so powerful – yet without insistence – as if singers were more directly in touch with something irreducible…The elemental is such that its expression is just its simple being…as if that song were the most natural thing in the world, were the very nature of things. For the elemental is just its simple being.”
Constellations of Meaning
The power of folksong lies not just in the materiality of the voice, but in the form’s abstract wisdom and style. The use of figurative and formulaic language, imagery and motifs – times of day, seasons of the year, colours, plants, birds – all contribute to what ballad scholar David Atkinson has called the unmistakable ‘ballad world.’[24] In such a highly suggestive narrative setting, the associations of traditional metaphors help establish a deeper recognition of cultural meaning. American ballad enthusiasts Wilentz and Marcus reflect,[25]
“For it to be a story, the song must make you listen; thus it calls upon metaphors from across the land, across hundreds of years and hundreds of generations, to catch your ear. Folk songs are unfathomable and undeniable. The old ballads carry a kind of truth, a collective something that is its own truth.”
Through time and through the process of tradition – through the process of creating and re-creating meaning – individual creativity can be distilled into a kind of collective memory, into what folksong scholar Toelken calls a ‘shared constellation of meanings’.[26] He writes,[27]
“By and large we are not studying the accumulated texts of a few educated poets but the dynamic record of a general dynamic capacity to use the poetic power available in the song traditions and the contexts of everyday life in order to foreground and articulate central features of shared human concern.”
Birds feature frequently as motifs in folksong, often signifying sexuality and seduction, as messengers of death or symbolic of romantic dalliances. The blackbird, however, goes against the conventional trend in northern Europe by being a black bird that is not generally associated with evil or bad luck; this said, is it not entirely free of this taint. In song, blackbirds were especially suspect for young lovers, often suggesting despair, regret or longing for lost love. The folksong ‘If I Were a Blackbird’ was well known in the farm districts of the North East of Scotland and in Northern Ireland (and even made the crossover into popular music[28]). There are many different versions and variations of this song; the version below, sung by Belle Stewart (1906 - 1997) was recorded by Hamish Henderson in 1956.[29] In the song, a young girl laments the loss of her young sailor lad who has gone to sea. She wishes that she was a blackbird and could follow his ship, or that she could write him a letter to tell her of her pain. The blackbird here becomes an abstract motif for the difficult emotional memories we carry with us:
I am a young maiden and my story is sad
For years I’ve been courted by a brave sailor lad.
He courted me truly by night and by day
But now he has left me and gone far away.
Now I if was a blackbird, could whistle and sing
I would follow the ship that my true love sails in
And on the top rigging I would there build my nest
And I'd sleep the night long on his lily-white breast.[30]
The song ‘What A Voice’, also known by the title ‘I Wish, I Wish’ / ‘Love Has Brought Me to Despair’ (highlighted earlier in this essay) also draws heavily on bird imagery, both the swallow and the blackbird. Here, the singer hears a girl telling of the grief that her false love has left her. In this case, the mention of the blackbird has such strong traditional connotations and associations that its very evocation can carry implied meanings not explicit in the text:
What a voice, what a voice, what a voice I hear
It's like the voice of my Willy dear
But if I had wings like that swallow high
I would clasp in the arms o’ my Billy boy.
When my apron it hung low
My true love followed through frost and snow
And noo my apron it is tae my chin
He passes me by and he ne'er spiers in.
It is up and doon yon white hoose brae
He called a strange girlie to his knee
And he's telt her a tale that he once told me.
There is a blackbird sits on yon tree
Some says it is blind and it cannae see
Some says it is blind and it cannae see
And so is my true love tae me.
O I wish, I wish oh I wish in vain
I wish I was a maid again
But a maid again I will never be
Till apples grow an orange tree
I wish I wish that my babe was born
And smiling on some nurse's knee
And for myself to be dead and gone
And a long green grass growing over me. [31]
In Toelken’s view, any traditional listening audience does more than just ‘hear’ a ballad or folksong: they ‘glean’ it. Songs like this are strange and ambiguous, containing very little explanation or detail. Figurative meaning, he writes, cannot be said to reside entirely within the text, but somewhere between the text (as it is performed) and that shared constellation of meanings and associative memory that gets triggered when a singer sings a certain song before an audience at a particular time. This is the power of the ballad aesthetic: the story is so distilled that the listener is required to ‘fill in the gaps’ - and so becomes a co-creator in the realisation of the song’s meaning.
In embodied aesthetic experience, sensation, memory and imagination coalesce into a pattern that connects different elements and layers of reality. The materiality of the singing voice binds humans to one another in the lived present through shared temporal experience. The meanings emerging from the juxtaposition of – or tension between – personal memories and the abstract meanings in a given song can be understood as a metaphorical process itself, opening up a liminal space for new meanings to be continually created.
An Ethnological Sensibility
I was not always so fascinated by the birds; while living in the city I barely noticed them. I was so distracted and disconnected from the world, disconnected even from my own body. It is a marvel what a change in circumstance and attitude can reveal. In our modern world, obsessed with work, productivity and counting things, we have created ways of living that are destroying the natural world that sustains us.
When it comes to the environment, the birds are our measure, our meter; they mark the coming and going of the seasons, they pollinate plants and disperse seeds, they help forests flourish. The presence of the birds – and their absence – is an insight into the health of our world. This is the theme of American biologist Rachel Carson’ book Silent Spring (1962), credited by many as igniting the wider environmental movement.[32] Written decades ago, the book takes its title from the unnatural quiet settling on a world that is losing its birds, raising awareness of the effects of pesticide pollutants on the biosphere. She writes:
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
Through our disconnection and our destruction, we are losing not only the birds, but the very capacity to notice, to pay attention. Writer Kathleen Jamie asks: ‘Given the state we are in, and the reckless exploitation of the Earth, can a moment of attending actually amount to a moment of resistance?’ [33] She writes,
“When we do that ̶ step outdoors, smell Autumn in the wind, seriously notice ̶ we’re not little cogs, little consumers, in someone else’s machine. We are not doing what the forces of destruction and inattention want us to do. It is our way of being, not theirs. It’s the simplest act of resistance and renewal.
What we subsequently do with that noticing, whether we transform it into poetry, art, science or activism comes a little later. But first, there must arise that primary act of attending.”
Since leaving the city, I have consciously made the effort to resist and renew, to become more attentive and attuned to the world around me. Aesthetic encounters – with the birds, with music and song – gift us a glimmer of a reality that we instantly know for a moment in time: an affirmation of wholeness, of interconnectedness. Part of my own creative practice is to find ways to cultivate an ethnological, ecological, geopoetic sensibility to this ‘pattern that connects’ – to find the threads through which life gains meaning. We all have the power to reclaim where we place our consciousness, of what we attend to, what we attune to. For right now, it’s me and the garden birds.