Chapter VIII: C. Professional Songs

(a) _The Chumak[1] songs._ Chumaks or merchants were well organized in groups and eagerly protected by the Ukrainian forces before attacks of nomadic tribes, as ones who were indispensably necessary for the progress and improvement of Ukraine. They were guarded by the Cossacks who collected toll from them.

Many of them met with ill luck. Here is a stanza from a song about the pair of oxen, that drove home alone, leaving their dead master far away from home:

... The eldest sister came out first:--
Oh, my little Chumak, Oh, my little brother, where hast thou met thy
death?
“We left our landlord in a foreign country.”
The little oxen amble along and bellow:
“We have left our landlord on our way home.”[2]

(b) Quite numerous are the _songs about the servants and small rural farmers_, that treat of the general home life, the toil and blessing connected with agriculture:

I shall sow my little wheat,
I shall sow a piece of land,
And when God blesses its growth
I shall make two stacks of it.

All birds came flying, sparrows flocked together,
Ate and sucked out the little wheat, leaving only stalks alone.
Oh that all these birds may die
For having eaten the poor widow’s precious little wheat![3]

(c) There are but few _Artisan songs_ in Ukrainian, since the city’s population was composed largely of a foreign element and was not so creative:

... We have all gathered together,
We are not common people but craftsmen:
Some clerks, some painters,
Some blacksmiths, some locksmiths,
Some musicians, some moulders,
Some little shoemakers, some shop-keepers;
Kuperyan is the master of the straw corporation.[4]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Chumak is a Tartar word for a waggoner, carter, carrier or driver; this word became identical with a trader or merchant. The Ukrainian peasants occupied especially with import and export of grain, textiles, dry fish, salt and other useful articles in wagons called mazha, were named Chumaks.

[2] Ivan Kolessa: Ethnographic collections.

[3] Ivan Kolessa: Ethnographic collection, Vol. XI, p. 242.

[4] Lysenko: “Collection of Ukrainian Songs,” Vol. III, p. 80.