"He had learned from his mother two hundred songs of which he knew every word in every verse."
This is a line from the biography of an Irish-Canadian priest that I'm currently reading. He was born in 1871.
How many songs do you know? Is the memorization of songs and poems declining? Is this something we should care about?
I've been concerned about the loss of oral lore for a long time. I've made conscious efforts to memorize poems and other things, but they have to be kept fresh in my mind or they fade away pretty quickly.
Reciting either "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe or "Ulysses" by Tennyson was my party piece for a few years. I never got the impression that my audience enjoyed it that much, though they humoured me.
One St. Patrick's Day about five years ago, I stood in the same tram carriage as a crowd of rowdy young people (teens or twenties). They sang song after song, obviously off by heart-- I forget the exact songs but they were mostly Irish-themed rock songs. (I think there was one Saw Doctors song). I found this reassuring.
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