Campfire Songs and the Death of Oral Culture

“I moved to the front of the room and clapped my hands for the room’s attention. Once the room was moderately quiet I began to play. By the time I struck the third chord everyone knew what it was: ‘Tinker Tanner’. The oldest song in the world. I took my hands from the lute and began to clap. Soon everyone was pounding out the rhythm in unison, feet against the floor, mugs on tabletops.

The sound was almost overwhelming, but it faded appropriately when I sang the first verse. Then I led the room in the chorus with everyone singing along, some with their own words, some in their own keys. I moved to a nearby table as I finished my second verse and led the room in the chorus again.

Then I gestured expectantly towards the table to sing a verse of their own. It took a couple of seconds for them to realise what I wanted, but the expectation of the whole room was enough to encourage one of the more tipsy students to shout out a verse of his own. It gained him thunderous applause and cheers. Then, as everyone sang the chorus again, I moved to another table and did the same thing.

Before too long folk were taking initiative to sing out their own verses when the chorus was over. I made my way to where Denna waited by the outer door and together we slipped out into the early evening twilight.

‘That was cleverly done,’ she said as we began to stroll away from the tavern. ‘How long do you think they’ll keep it up?’”

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (2007)

 

Our Guide campfires tend to be bigger than this one. And not as neat.

So you know ‘Baby Shark’?

In the event that you don’t, I feel I should warn you that, even though I have felt obliged to leave a link to the relevant video in the forthcoming footnote,¹ you may well find that your day is a better one if you refrain from clicking on it. The song is, to put it bluntly, blooming annoying. There isn’t really enough of a melody to call it ‘catchy’ per se, and yet it will still somehow manage to end up as firmly stuck in your head as chewed gum on the underside of a secondary-school desk. If you’re unlucky enough to have heard it already, I imagine it’s taking up its lodgings in your brain even now. Sorry. But I assure you I’m not just needlessly torturing you; I do have a point.

The thing is, the particular version of ‘Baby Shark’ that has so successfully impressed itself upon society’s consciousness is just that: a particular version, and a recent one at that. A Korean company called Pinkfong uploaded it to YouTube in 2016, and it went viral from there,² but the song itself is far, far older than that. I know, because we used to sing it as a campfire song at Brownies and Guides when I was a kid. ‘Baby Shark’ as we knew it was, as campfire songs tend to be, rather more violent than Pinkfong’s smiling, bubblegum version: it involved limb loss, failed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and some very strange ideas indeed about life after death – although that last one is, again, standard practice with campfire songs. It’s a lot more fun than the Pinkfong one, though, and so when members of the Brownie unit in which I’m proud to call myself an Assistant Leader asked, during a singing session one meeting, whether we might sing ‘Baby Shark’ next, I was happy enough to oblige. What caught me by surprise, though, was that, when my version began to diverge from Pinkfong’s, the girls were rather put out and told me I was doing it wrong.

I mean, it would have been a fair enough comment, if it were the case that there were one correct incarnation of the song and I wasn’t singing it, but that simply isn’t how campfire songs work. They are fluid by nature. You learn them by ear of an evening and repeat what you remember later; you readjust, add or remove verses as suits your circumstances. You meet another unit at an event and swap songs and parts thereof that the other hasn’t heard before. These things are passed down through generations: they persist for decades and decades and, though unchanged in essence, they morph into new versions of themselves everywhere they go. In order to be doing ‘Baby Shark’ wrong, you’d have to be doing it in such a fashion as to render it unrecognisable. And yes, your unit will have certain verses it’s attached to, and it probably isn’t very kind or sensible to disregard that, but the valid complaint is, I don’t like that version, rather than, That’s not how it goes.

A baby shark. And its mother. That’s the first two verses gone.

But for those of my Brownies who’d learnt the song off YouTube rather than round a real or imagined campfire, it was conceived of as having a set form, à la Pinkfong. To be honest, I can hardly blame them for that. All I can really do is draw attention to the fact as exhibiting one more way in which our ever more codified society is making oral culture firmly a thing of the past.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a ginormous fan of codifying stuff. Write the thing down, make copies, digitise it, do everything you can to make sure it’s not lost to posterity: given that my day job at the moment entails producing codified forms of artefacts whose place of origin has lately been a war zone then overrun by extremists intent on the total destruction of anything and anyone inconsistent with their own narrow worldview,³ I’d be the last person to criticise any project designed to get some element of human culture concretely recorded in such manner as will last for future generations. And it’s absolutely brilliant that we live in a world where information can be laid up so that it’s unerasable and accessible to anyone, not vulnerable to war or extremism or fire or flood or anything. I love that we live in a world where it’s possible for people to carve their mark in digital stone and know that it will be there for anyone who likes – anyone mad enough, in Pinkfong’s case – to look at it. You know what, I’ll say it: the disappearance of oral culture – of the setup whereby traditions are passed on from one generation of a society to the next solely by word of mouth – is a price worth paying for modern information technologies. But am I allowed to affirm that, and still acknowledge a sense of loss or sadness that my Brownies know Pinkfong’s version of ‘Baby Shark’, as if it were some kind of universal canon, rather than a version they might have claimed for themselves in their own Girlguiding community? Am I allowed to permit the death of oral culture while still enjoying what I can of its last stronghold?

Because it does seem to me that, in the developed and digitised west at least, campfire songs are indeed the last great stronghold of oral culture. Where else are traditions handed down merely by speaking and listening in the same way? And their very orality is part of their essence, part of what makes them such enormous fun: the adaptability, the feeling of being in on something, even the openness to corruptibility. For instance, I know a campfire song about an ostrich who goes yodelling on a mountaintop – except that I recently learnt that I had been taught a corruption of an earlier incarnation in which an Austrian went yodelling. Obvious, really; I’m ashamed the thought never occurred to me before. But isn’t the idea of an ostrich going yodelling better fun? And since the song serves no higher purpose than that, who’s to say the version with the ostrich is wrong? It might represent a divergence from the song as originally conceived, but given that you’ll never manage to trace and pin down the ultimate original form of something in such a constant state of change and development as a campfire song, what does it matter? Or similarly, when I was first taught the song ‘Three Little Angels’ (which is as utterly daft and repetitive as just about anything you’ll ever sing round a campfire), I only learnt three verses, but when I later heard one in which some Boy Scouts try to get to heaven on a washing machine but are thwarted when the spin cycle ends, I was so amused by it that I rarely teach the song without it now; it would never occur to me to say of it that that isn’t how ‘Three Little Angels’ is supposed to go. There is no canonical form: the only criterion is what’s fun to sing.

 

I mean, just imagine an ostrich yodelling. Hilarious.

There’s rather a lot of going to heaven in campfire songs, actually. Possibly that tendency is partially blameable on the fact that many campfire songs stem from a time when culture at large was at least superficially Christianised. There’s a famous one called ‘You’ll Never Get to Heaven’ which could arguably be taken as a song of repentance if the whole thing weren’t so patently ridiculous: it has a chorus, as I learnt recently, that goes: I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more; I ain’t gonna grieve, I ain’t gonna swear, I ain’t gonna pull my sister’s hair; I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more. That comes after verses like, You’ll never get to heaven in a biscuit tin, ’cause a biscuit tin’s got biscuits in and You’ll never get to heaven in [insert name of leader]’s bra, ’cause [leader]’s bra won’t stretch that far. Total nonsense – but because campfire songs persist, and because they persist in use, moreover – not codified, not sitting gathering dust, not needing to be studied as foreign artefacts or translated from the forms in which they were captured all those years ago – they preserve, however imperfectly, the shapes of ideas that society as it is now would never generate of its own accord.

That’s not me saying that campfire songs might serve as some sort of roundabout evangelistic tool (that’s right, Brownies, you better had make a commitment not to grieve the Lord any more, because you never shall get to heaven in any covering but the blood of Jesus shed on your behalf, biscuit tin or otherwise) – as I say, they’re total nonsense, and meant to be taken as such. I suppose that’s what makes them so ripe for continued existence as oral culture in a world where instant information access on demand has left us all with terrible under-exercised memories: it really doesn’t matter if you remember them wrong, just as long as they’re a good laugh.

I suppose, in citing the lyrics of parts of ‘You’ll Never Get to Heaven’ above, I have made my own contribution to the great inevitable march towards codification. But you really can’t imagine that you know the song from a few typed-out lyrics. You have to sit there in a circle with your peers and learn this stuff by call and response. You have to laugh, and get it wrong, and forget bits, and make new bits up and see if they stick, and pick up elements of other groups’ versions and pass yours on to them. You have to hold it in your head and bring it out when the occasion calls for it and see what the thing becomes this time. Pinkfong doesn’t get the last word on how ‘Baby Shark’ goes: any campfire-song-singing community anywhere can inherit and adapt and maintain and hand on its own version.

At the end of the day, modern information technologies and campfire songs do, after all, have one important thing in common: they put the power to create and adapt and pass on certain material in the hands of ordinary randomers like you and me, without requiring the approval of any appointed higher authority that dictates what that material is supposed to look like. The same freedom that lets me teach the version of ‘Baby Shark’ I remember from my childhood to the Brownies, lets me upload blog posts sketching out my strange little thoughts for lovely people like you to peruse should they wish to. I dare to entertain a hope that the latter activity is of marginally more benefit to the pertinent audience than the former.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

² Apparently helped along to some degree by Kpop groups like Blackpink performing it at their concerts. Personally I think Blackpink have much better things to do: if their video for ‘Ddu-du Ddu-du’ – currently the most viewed music video by any K-pop group – doesn’t convince you that Kpop is super fun, I’m not sure what will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHNzOHi8sJs.

³ I work on stuff from what’s now Iraq. So … yeah. There are some glimmers of a positive future for the Iraqi heritage sector though: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/01/training-fieldwork-iraqi-archaeologists-of-the-future-qalatga-darband.