The Archives, the Music and People on the Margins

The collection and documentation of culture are not steered by democratic principles concerning everyone’s equal rights, but rather by the ideologies and visions of states, organisations and individuals. A lack of the cultural expressions and traditions of subcultures and minorities in Sweden’s national archives is most often not the result of ill-will or racism. It is instead the effect of the role of cultural heritage institutions in creating official versions of our common history, and the national value scales which have determined what should be worth collecting and archiving and what should be left aside. All interpretations of the past are coloured by and filtered through ideologies from the days when they were created. It is of even greater importance that they are also influenced by the context in which they were intended to be used. The goal of the national projects of the 1800s was to create oneness — one aim was to show that the nation was culturally homogenous. Subcultures had therefore no — or, at least, little — place in the writing of a nation’s history. This applies to original populations such as Sweden’s Sami people, but also other types of marginalised groups in society. Since criminals — by definition — are outside majority society and to some extent also oppose its values, it is not surprising that prison songs have not had a place in Sweden’s cultural heritage. Crime and criminals have, however, always been seen as fascinating by ordinary people, and news media and literature have spoken of them.

This is one of the reasons why songs about crime comprised an important genre when it came to producing broadsides. In the broadside collection of the National Library of Sweden, “Songs of malefactors” is a category of its own. In the world of the broadside ballads, however, the criminal himself is seldom heard. The crimes are instead portrayed by — or, as was often the case, words were put into the mouth of the criminal by — some other author. Svenskt visarkiv’s collections during the 1960s and ’70s were thus something new: a documentation of the music usage which was a part of the everyday culture in Swedish prisons. The collecting was done in a period when ideas regarding cultural values were in a process of change — even in cultural heritage institutions.

Svenskt visarkiv broadened its focus concerning recordings — in addition to clink songs, documentations of Tornedalen-Finnish and Finnish and Sami music took place in the early 1970s. The archive also collected street music, songs of Travellers and children’s culture — clapping songs and rhymes from schoolyards (Boström 2016:80). All of this I see as indicators of a changed and broadened view of the preservation of folk culture. A contemporaneous discussion took place regarding the terms folkmusik [folk music] and folklig musik [popular/folksy music] — the latter term could embrace a broader spectrum of musical manifestations, whereas the former term was regarded by many as being bound to a romantic 19^th-century view of folk culture. Typically, Arkivet för folklig dans [The Popular Dance Archive] was founded in 1965 by Henry Sjöberg. Similar changes in how culture is looked upon took place in many cultural heritage institutions.

A large part of the documentation of minorities and subcultures focuses on that which is regarded as unusual. Attention is paid to that which differs from both majority society and other social groupings in some decisive, understandable and relevant manner. This implies that those parts of prison culture that did not deviate from the majority found no place in the collections. This is one of the reasons why Svenskt visarkiv’s documentation of clink songs increased the distinctive character of the genre.

The cultural heritage loop

Illustration: Cristina Viksten.

This is an illustration of a process that might be called a ”cultural heritage loop”. When music or other cultural expressions are collected by archives and museums, their function change. Simply put, they can be said to change from being culture to becoming cultural heritage. What often happens is that the collected material is organised and published, which in turn can spread and eventually affect the living culture outside. The process where culture becomes a cultural heritage can be called “cultural heritageing” and can be described in four steps: identification – categorisation – standardisation – symbolisation.

Identification means that a selection of practitioners and/or songs is chosen as typical or representative for a music style, an area, or a group of people. Through this, the genre is clarified. Many of the folk musicians recorded through the Svenskt visarkiv’s collection project during the ’60s and ’70s had extensive repertoires with general Swedish popular music and songs. Through the selection process of the collecting work, the part of the repertoire that was defined by the collectors as folk music became categorised and purified. Through the publication of printed music, research reports and recordings, the repertoire was standardised, and a musical canon was created and spread to an interested audience and among the practitioners themselves. Some of the tunes and instruments have taken on a representative meaning as national symbols – for instance the Swedish nyckelharpa [keyed fiddle] and the polska dances.