Suede: Musique populaire

Liner notes booklet written in Swedish and translated into English and then English to French.

Swedish folk music has a history stretching back many centuries; tunes and songs are born and live on. Many people immediately think of fiddlers, but Sweden has also had numerous singers of folk songs. Up until our own time music has been used as a working tool, for example for herding.

This compact disc illustrates many aspects of Swedish folk music with recordings both from the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation's collection of folk music and from the Swedish Center for Folk Song and Folk Music Research. These two archives represent a cultural treasure with innumerable recordings of folk musicians and singers, many of them performing in their own homes. The earliest radio recordings are from the early thirties but from the late forties onwards there was a much more systematic effort at recording and documenting folk music undertaken by the producer Matts Arnberg. Much earlier , collectors had, notated and thus preserved melodies by prominent musicians . But sound recording made it possible to hear exactly how musicians played, which is of particular interest to people who play themselves and want to learn the melody or to adopt the musician's style. Many of the tradition-bearers included on this compact disc are "historical models", musicians whom young fiddlers and singers of today learn from, thus developing their own way of playing.