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youtube
i heard this melody so many times anybody know where its from

Good question!
I don't think it's from anything "classical."

And if it is, it's not any very familiar piece, and I have no idea what composer it would be, although I could mention about 50 that I'm pretty sure it isn't.

....but on second thought, I found the answer.

What did it was, I remembered that it's used for "snake charming."

(It's basically "nothing," except that "it is what it is.")

I have found this ...

Nice!
Although I see that the "cartoons" listing doesn't include......POPEYE!

Of all things.

4:06 on here:



(How can anybody do a cartoon listing of this without Popeye.....)

Ah, the old "there's a place in France, where the women have no pants" song. Written by a guy named Sol Bloom during the Chicago Worlds Columbian Exposition.

Cool!
How did you find it?

That's funny, I heard it as "there's a place in France, where to Chopin they do dance."

I thought it was the place where the naked ladies dance...

so i take it is a folk song. thanks for the information tho

Oh, but that's not so simple!

We know who the composer is, so how can it be a folk song?

Yet, many people sing it and include it in pop culture without knowing who the composer was. So isn't that a folk song?

Really, every folk song has an original composer. Folk songs don't come out of thin air. Somebody has to be the first to conceive of it.

its funny i made a thread on this cause i heard this melody so many times throughout my life and ever since i started learning the keys my knowledge of everything has expanded.

Absolutely not at all.
At least not in the usual sense.

A folk song is (I think) something that has a history of having developed among "the people" and got passed on, and became sort of traditional.

This is something that was created by a particular person for a particular event -- and then happened to catch on.

I assume you mean the Popeye?

I googled:
-- popeye "snake charmer" --

.....and two cartoons came up -- this and another one.

The other actually had better snake-charming stuff, but used a different melody, similar to this one but just a bit different, sort of a variant, which I'd guess was composed for the cartoon.

Mark, that may be true, but this tune DOES have a history of having developed among "the people". I mean, "there's a place in France where the women have no pants", and all that.

On the other hand, one could say the same about Wagner ("here comes the bride, big fat and wide") ("Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit...") (etc).

And often times, what we now consider to be folksongs also were created by a particular person for a particular event. "Hava Nagila", for example. It was originally just a melody without words (composed in the 1800s). The words were added by Idelssohn (or one of his students, depends on who tells the story) in 1918 to celebrate the British take-over of Palestine. Only then, 1918, did it spread around the world as a Zionist propoganda song, and now people think it's an ancient folksong (maybe Moses was singing it on Sinai).

Around 1900, Mark Warshawsky published his book of "Jewish folksongs" (which he had composed himself of course), and the ethographer Joel Engel threw a hissy fit. (How can you call these folk songs? You composed them yourself!) Of course, most of Warshawsky's songs are thought of now as folksongs, even though it's not secret he wrote them himself.

Ah, I didn't know there was a "snake charmer" cartoon with Popeye at all.

....and to me it seemed as though half of the Popeye cartoons had snake charming in them.

Maybe, but I haven't watched many of these cartoons. A pity - because they are better than today's cartoons.

I don't think that is necessarily true for all folk music. I think a sort of natural selection process involving many generations of reiteration could result in a current version that is drastically different from how it started, which may not have been a "song" at all, but a stylized way of telling a story that gradually evolved into a song over many generations.