little bird, little bird, fly through my window

folk, USA/Canada/UK

performed by Pete Seeger:

key: D major
mode: D E F# G A B C#
melody: d r m f s l
form: strophic with refrain
meter: mixed

English function names: tonic dominant
Tagg (modified):        home  counterpoise (away)
Riemann:                T     D7
Scale degrees:          I     V7
Chords:                 D     A7

 D          A7
|/ / |/. / |/ / |/. / |
 D          A7   D
|/ / |/. / |/ / |/ / |
 D    A7        D
|/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / |
 A7   D
|/ / |/ / |

There is much open to interpretation in this song, which creates more questions than definitive answers. Is this a play-party? Is it a dance? Was it for adults or for children? It seems to be for children. There seem to be some dance-like motions associated with it. In the Crawford Seeger book she suggests two "games" that seem simply like folk dances — not unlike contradancing or line dancing. There's no game element to it. I'm not talking about winning and losing, but even something simple like the person in the center chooses the next person. That is absent from the description.

The play-party¹ was a form of family entertainment in a religious/cultural milieu where singing and dancing was rather restricted. Some play-parties did have a game element to them; some were simply dances. If your culture forbids dancing, then you are definitely not going to call moving your body to a beat "dancing;" you're going to call it something else — a game, a play-party. This song does not appear in the index of American Folk Songs for Children as a play-party, possibly because it didn't originate as one. It simply became one in certain parts of North America.

Is it strophic with a refrain? Is it strophic without a refrain? Is it verse-chorus? I find the song too short to be verse-chorus, but if we want to parse it that way, we can say that the first two phrases are the verse and the second two are the chorus — and both sections end with the refrain "buy molasses candy." As far as strophic without a refrain goes, I think this might be the interpretation if we feel that it is essentially a one-strophe song,² that is elongated via repetition only for the sake of getting small children to name different birds. Not a generous interpretation, but a possible one.

What about the meter? Is it |/ / |/. / | or |/ /. |/ / | ? I think this depends to some extent on what words you sing. For example, the Ruth Crawford Seeger/John Lomax notation uses the second example which fits nicely with "Little bird, little bird go through my window." Whereas both Pete Seeger (Ruth's stepson) and Elizabeth Mitchell sing, "Little bird, little bird, fly through my window." Linguistically, these variations jive with natural stress points in speaking — that is, the stressed word in speaking falls on the macrobeat in the music.

Is it American? Canadian? British? My guess is that this version stems from earlier British songs with similar lyrics and melodies and spread throughout their colonies/diaspora. Some versions are duple all the way through. This makes sense on one level, since most folk songs from the UK are monometric. That said, when you listen to old field recordings of people singing unaccompanied, you'll often hear that people are not necessarily that steady rhythmically. Sometimes the transcriber will be very faithful to the performance; sometimes the transcriber will "correct" the performance in the notation. Who's to say who is right? I do wonder if the mixed meter here is from an "uneven" performance of a single person that was enshrined via notation, as mixed meter seems to be so uncommon in British diaspora folk music. Alternately, I do also wonder if the rarity of mixed meter is because too many transcribers "corrected" their performers' performances. Being fond of mixed meter in general, I am a little sad about the recordings that are duple all the way through. A missed opportunity, I say.

On the larger rhythmic level, we have three phrases of four measures and then a little mini-phrase, or tag if you will, for the fourth phrase. A lot of unevenness going on. You’ll hear in the recording, the final short phrase is mitigated by a vamp to provide Q&A time to solicit more ideas for what is coming through the window next, one of the easiest and most effective ways to keep the kiddos involved. In just a few phrases, the song includes three of our common harmonic rhythm patterns. The first two phrases form a counterpoise kickback, that is, it starts like a shuttle but then doubles the pace in order to end on the tonic. The third phrase is a counterpoise sandwich — two slices of tonic with a dominant filling. This then elides into a dominant-tonic shuttle for the half-phrase/coda/tag.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: There are those who think that songs for children and songs with only two harmonies are somehow unsophisticated and not worth one's attention. If that's you, I hope you'll reconsider.

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some notations:

https://kodalycollection.org/song.cfm?id=784

https://archives.vwml.org/search/all:combined/0_50/all/score_desc/extended-roudNo_tr:7700

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other recordings:

The Dreamtree Shakers, Big Top Tent, self released. E

Elizabeth Mitchell, You Are My Little Bird, Smithsonian Folkways. Bb

Nova Scotia, B.

1. For more on the play party, see here and here.

2. The reasoning here being that a refrain is by definition repeated; if there is only one strophe, then there's no repetition. It's not like a ballad, where there are multiple strophes that tell a story with a repeated line that helps engage listeners as the line that everyone can sing along to.