MAY THEME: Animals Acting Like People (or Anthropomorphism Runs Amok)
To comment on other people’s foibles, including the behavior of the powerful, can have dangerous social repercussions. Making the protagonist a frog instead of a man, and framing your criticism as a children’s story, can give it a thin veil of acceptability, or at least deniability! There is a very long history of folk tales where animals are treated as people, have names, even wear clothes, and do many of the same smart and foolish things that humans do. Think of Aesop’s fables, Chicken Little, Puss in Boots, How the Camel Got His Hump…not to mention Black Beauty, Watership Down, and Animal Farm.
I collect songs where animals act like people. They are not all old songs, either! How about Three Little Fishies, 1939 (“The three little fishies didn’t wanna be bossed!…so they swam and they swam right over the dam!”) and all the Disney movie songs sung by crickets and foxes, elephants, crows, dogs and ducks. Here is some inspo: https://www.listchallenges.com/the-complete-list-of-disney-songs-in
My own favorites are the old songs, like Froggie Went a-Courtin’ (we could do a whole night just of versions of that song, there are so many!) Other examples are Leatherwing Bat (where animals exchange dating tips), the ballad The Three Ravens (where carrion eaters discuss recipes for Slain Knight Tartare), The Carnal and the Crane (where birds debate theology), and Daddy Fox (where hungry fox kits congratulate their daddy on his night’s hunting.)
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Here is a short column I did on the subject:
"TALKING ANIMALS"
One of the characteristics of a traditional ballad is that it tells a story, and in the songs and folk tales of every continent, talking animals are as common as mice. Some, in fact, are mice, like Miss Mousie in the familiar “Froggie Went a-Courting”. (It’s not in the Child collection, but it’s definitely a quite old narrative song.). Here we find the mouse and frog couple wearing clothes, riding horses, flirting, and worrying what the neighbors will say about an eligible bachelor gaining admittance to the house while Uncle Rat is away. In short, the animals here act pretty much like people—though I make an exception for the couple’s dining habits. In some American versions the entire wedding party feasts on “two green beans and a black-eyed pea”. In a related animal-wedding song from Trinidad, “Hell Of A Wedding” (a version of “The Monkey’s Wedding”), the happy couple serve mosquito liver and sandfly gizzard. (…Thanks, Mrs., um, Frog, but I ate just before coming over!)
“Daddy Fox” seems pretty animal-like in his pursuit of domestic fowl to feed his little fox kits back at the den…until he and his wife start cutting up the goose with a fork and knife while the kids chatter about sending Daddy back to the farm for more! A similar case might be “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight/The Outlandish Knight”, where the girl’s parrot acts pretty much like any parrot, going in to a tizzy over prowling cats, and squawking out embarrassing things. What makes him supernatural is that he goes on to exercise a bit of gentle blackmail, negotiating with his little mistress for more luxurious living conditions, in exchange for keeping his beak shut about her murderous nocturnal wandering with handsome rascals.
Talking birds turn out to be fairly numerous in the ballads, where they are often messengers or witnesses. The beaten and starved cage-bird in “The Bonnie Birdie” has been abused by the knight's philandering wife, and is out for revenge.
“Had your good lady but keepit her word
I wouldna thus betray her!”
Most talking birds in the ballads, however, are bystanders who witness an event. The bird in “Young Hunting” sees a girl ruthlessly kill her lover. He chides her about it, and then carefully stays out of her reach—for fear she’ll kill him too. (In some versions he then leads the search party to the body.) In “The Broomfield Hill”, the would-be rapist berates his hunting hawk for allowing its master to sleep through the visit of the girl he’s stalking—and the bird vigorously answers him that it was his own fault:
“If ye slept more in the night, master,
Ye’d waken more in the day!
If ye’d awakened from your sleep
She would’t have gotten away.”
In “The Twa Corbies/Three Ravens”, hungry talking corvids converse in distastefully culinary terms about a slain knight. (There is a clearly supernatural, but silent, doe in this song, too. She personifies the dead knight’s pregnant lover, who sadly buries him before the crows can carry out their grisly intentions.) In “The Gay Goshawk” the messenger bird not only carries a letter, but discusses a lover’s feelings at length with the desired girl.
“Here’s a letter from your love,
He says he sent you three;
He cannot wait your love any longer,
He says for your sake he’ll die.”
In “The Earl of Mar’s Daughter”, the lover goes even farther: through a spell cast by his mother, he is a captive dove by day, but a man by night. The “dove” becomes the secret father of the girl’s seven children.
“O Coo-my-dove, my love so true,
It’s time to go to bed;”
“With all my heart, my dear marrow,
It’ll be as ye have said!”
In “The Carnal and the Crane”, the birds seem to have been chosen for their symbolic associations: the carrion crow is a symbol of death and afterlife in more than one tradition, and the crane is associated with loyalty, good fortune, and a life well lived. The two birds discuss how the world has changed with the birth of Christ, and exchange news about the holy family’s escape from Herod."