Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Badass Women in Folk Song starts next week! Virtual cohorts start on Thursday, January 16th, and the Asheville in-person cohort start on Monday, January 13th.
In our time together, we’ll learn a one-of-a-kind collection of ballads and songs about witches, warriors and triumphant women from Scotland, England and Appalachia, and strategies of resistance that these folk songs teach us.
Go to sarosings . com and scroll down on the home page to learn more!
I love this nearly 500 year-old English folk song for the many meanings we can draw from its lyrics. In “Go From My Window,” sung from a woman’s perspective, the narrator repeatedly tells her lover to leave, saying “you cannot have a harboring here.”
There have been many popular stories about what this song means…Often, it’s told that a woman is having an affair, and when her husband is unexpectedly home, she sings this song to her baby, but loud enough for her lover at the window to safely get the message and go home. Sometimes, it’s a young woman singing to her lover because her father is home instead.
But to me, the first time I heard it, this song was about something else…The complexities that can come about in relationships in which we might love someone, but they’re not good or even safe for us to be around.
To have to say, “I love you, but you still have to leave.” This second verse, with the lyrics “the devil’s in the man,” makes me think of this.
I love how oral traditions allow us to put our own meaning into the old songs and stories. The old folk songs are designed in such a way that they easily can become our own. We’ll be exploring this aspect of folk tradition in Badass Women- sign up now before classes start next week! Go to sarosings . com and scroll down on my home page to learn more!
Badass Women in Folk Song starts next week! Virtual cohorts start on Thursday, January 16th, and the Asheville in-person cohort start on Monday, January 13th.
In our time together, we’ll learn a one-of-a-kind collection of ballads and songs about witches, warriors and triumphant women from Scotland, England and Appalachia, and strategies of resistance that these folk songs teach us.
Go to sarosings . com and scroll down on the home page to learn more!
I love this nearly 500 year-old English folk song for the many meanings we can draw from its lyrics. In “Go From My Window,” sung from a woman’s perspective, the narrator repeatedly tells her lover to leave, saying “you cannot have a harboring here.”
There have been many popular stories about what this song means…Often, it’s told that a woman is having an affair, and when her husband is unexpectedly home, she sings this song to her baby, but loud enough for her lover at the window to safely get the message and go home. Sometimes, it’s a young woman singing to her lover because her father is home instead.
But to me, the first time I heard it, this song was about something else…The complexities that can come about in relationships in which we might love someone, but they’re not good or even safe for us to be around.
To have to say, “I love you, but you still have to leave.” This second verse, with the lyrics “the devil’s in the man,” makes me think of this.
I love how oral traditions allow us to put our own meaning into the old songs and stories. The old folk songs are designed in such a way that they easily can become our own. We’ll be exploring this aspect of folk tradition in Badass Women- sign up now before classes start next week! Go to sarosings . com and scroll down on my home page to learn more!
