Song choices s5 (Roger)

I’m disappointed by the songs used in s5 that Roger sings. The modern 60s song choices are fine, and make sense. The 19th century ones don’t make sense and are a huge disappointment.

The 1960s saw a huge resurgence in folk music, and celtic folk music was a huge part of that. As a historian, and a musically inclined one, at that, I would have expected Roger to have a strong interest in Scottish, English and Irish folk pieces, not “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” which is an American folk song from the 1880s, written about the California gold rush era (1849 and forward).

Roger would have known about Cecil Sharp’s work, collecting “lost” folk songs from English and Scottish residents of Appalachia, who had preserved via oral tradition songs that their antecedents had brought with them from the Old World. These songs had long since been lost in England; Sharp “collected” them to preserve them and in doing so, sort of started the folk revival in the Victorian era.

This was a missed opportunity. I have no idea if this storyline appears in the novels, but even if it does, it would have been amazing if the music team for the series had gone in this direction instead of Clementine.