“Am I to blame”: an old romance and a modern song

Abstract

The article examines the origins of the song “Am I to blame.” and its further evolution up to our time. The earliest mention of the song dates back to 1956. The melody of the song is independent, and the text of the early version goes back to three sources: 1) the romance “Am I to blame?” (1865), published under the name “Anna R.”; 2) romance-response “It’s all your fault!” by V. Sulkowski (1886); 3) anonymous chant verse from the mid-1910s. The contamination of these sources resulted in a dialogic composition. The romance tells the story of a coquette who skillfully plays with a man’s feelings and ultimately destroys him; in the song, according to a stable folklore tradition, the suffering character was a girl. The song is dominated by the theme of the intrinsic value of love which entered the folk song tradition from the poetry of sentimentalism and romanticism. While the early version is a drawn-out lyrical one, then the later ones increasingly resemble a fast dance one. In the “male version”, which emerged in the late 2010s, the gender roles of the characters are inverted.