Digital Folklore Narratives: ‘The Seen Story’ and ‘The Told Story’ in Selected Songs of John De Mathew

Abstract

Digital advancement has expanded the research landscape in folklore studies. The digital space has become a resourceful arena for the dissemination of contemporary folklore, such as the popular song. This evolution relates to folklore studies in terms of accessibility to research content because it enhances scholarship in African popular culture. Folklore materials are now more readily available on digital platforms for modern folklore scholars. This has reduced the traditional research challenges of accessibility, such as distance and inaccessibility, transport costs, hostility, and climatic issues, among other capital and social hardships related to fieldwork in orature, as pointed out by Nandwa and Bukenya (1983). The artistic complexities of orature composition, performance, delivery and reception have experienced a compositional shift from the traditional performance arena into a modern hybrid mode where composition and performance are filmed into audio-visual discourses. The filmed content produces a 'told story' and a 'seen story' delivered on the screen through the audio-visual platform. This platform generates narration in the popular song two-fold: the performed story (in this case, the dramatized song) and the narrative constructed through lyrics and melody. This compositional transaction opens the reception ground to not only the audiences present during the performance but also the viewing and listening audience congregated by the audio-visual platform. This paper presents the two versions of the 'told story' and the 'seen story' in selected songs of John De Mathew, a legendary Gĩkũyũ Benga artist. The songs were selected purposefully, and the analysis employed a qualitative research design. The data is collected from digital platforms for transcription into scripts. The selected songs have been listened to and viewed on the screen to identify the two versions of each song narrative emerging as 'the told story' and 'the seen story'. Translation of the lyrics from Gĩkũyũ into English has been done for the purpose of accessibility by non-Gĩkũyũ speakers. A description of the narratives has been made using the theoretical provisions of narratology. This has been guided by three theoretical principles of narratology: story, narration and narrative. These principles are fundamental elements in the construction of a story. The main achievement of this article is to enhance the trajectory that the encroachment of folklore dissemination within digital platforms provides new research paradigms for contemporary scholarship.