Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Lighter
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 08:10 AM
Considering the general treatment of blacks in the South in the 1930s. "patronization" was a step forward.
Lead Belly's prison stripes - or his performances sitting a on a cotton bale in denims and a straw hat - look ridiculous and patronizing today, even offensive and racist. But back then such costumes were intended to emphasize to an ignorant audience the authenticity of the singer and the songs, and the fact that both were coming from a very different place than the pop music of the day. In the same manner, white country musicians were expected to dress on stage like cowboys or hillbillies.
I'm not saying any of this was a good idea - just that the intention and widely perceived meaning wasn't necessarily bigoted or demeaning, though Lead Belly (like anyone else) was certainly justified in his resentment of having to impersonate a stereotyped version of himself.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Brian Peters
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 08:21 AM
Re Azizi's comment about the prison stripes, I'd always been disturbed by the story too. However, according to the Cultural Equity website, it's a myth. Cut and paste follows:
Did John A. Lomax make Lead Belly perform in stripes?
Legend has it that John A. Lomax forced Lead Belly to perform in stripes. Lomax himself refers to Lead Belly as performing in his prison clothes, that is, the clothes he wore when he was released, these would have been overalls such as farmers wore, not stripes. All descriptions of Lead Belly's performances for John A. Lomax refer to him as wearing overalls with a bandana around his neck to disguise a scar. The publicity photo that appeared on the cover of the Lomaxes' book, Negro Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, showed him in this outfit, barefoot, sitting on a bale of hay. Country blues and country and hillbilly music was marketed in this way, with white performers presented in overalls as well, even as late as the 1960s TV show "Hee Haw." In his later career, Lead Belly, who was always an elegant dresser, established a new image for folksingers by performing while wearing a suit. Lead Belly's own stationary in later times, after he had become estranged from John A. Lomax, shows two photos of the performer, one on the left, in overalls and the other on the right, wearing a tuxedo and top hat. The image of Lead Belly in prison stripes was diffused through a newsreel film made by Time magazine and by a theater piece that Lead Belly had arranged to appear in for several weeks in Harlem after his association with John A. Lomax had ended.
What is the source of the prison stripes story?
On January 8, 1935, John Lomax and Lead Belly appeared on Time magazine's March of Time radio show featuring reenacted news (news was not yet be recorded in real time.) The radio dramatization told how Lead Belly was released from prison and featured some of his songs. It was broadcast nationwide and heard in millions of homes. Soon after, Time initiated production of filmed newsreels, also consisting of reenacted stories, to be shown in movie theaters. The story of Lomax's discovery of Lead Belly was the second one of these, and was made over a two-day period in February 1935. John A. Lomax is credited with assisting in writing the screenplay — though Alan Lomax actually wrote a first version which was overridden — and both John A. and Lead Belly appeared in it. In the first scene, Lead Belly wore stripes to dramatize the occasion of their meeting in Angola. This scene was to be balanced with depiction of Lead Belly's marriage to Martha Promise (in which the singer is shown wearing a suit) and his singing of "Goodnight, Irene." The final scene featured an orchestra playing "Goodnight, Irene" in the background as Lead Belly's songs are deposited in the Library of Congress along with the Declaration of Independence, a copy of which was shown.
John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax's purpose in collaborating on this film was to convey that music created by the Black working people of the United States was an unjustly neglected national treasure, as important to our heritage as our founding documents. Unfortunately, the final movie was edited in a way that focused on the sensational part of the story and deemphasized the final scenes. Shown in theaters nationwide, the newsreel made Lead Belly a celebrity, and it was through it that the image of the singer wearing stripes was imprinted on the public mind. Though the film was not under the Lomaxes' control — Alan Lomax in fact hated it and it had been a huge mistake for them to entrust themselves to mass media —it has been cited as evidence of John A. Lomax's degradation of Lead Belly. On the other hand, however, the film was significant in presenting Lead Belly as an artist whose work was valuable and relevant to American audiences of every ethnicity in an age when Jim Crow and racist market segmentation were the norm."
Here's a clip of Lead Belly performing in prison, stripes and all, and speaking with John Lomax. Get a load of that circular strumming pattern!
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 08:28 AM
I sometimes find discussions like this often fail to take into consideration the times in which these events took place.
I remember reading John Lomax's 'Adventures of a Ballad Hunter' and getting a great deal of pleasure from it, while at the same time, cringing a little at some of the attitudes reflected.
I Found this a pretty interesting description of Alan Lomax
CULTURAL EQUITY
Favourite story of him has always been of the time he was collecting with Seamus Ennis in the Hebrides, when the women 'waulkers' extemporised a bawdy, verging on obscene song on his masculine attributes in Scots Gaelic.
Ennis, perfectly aware off what was going on, didn't explain the subject of the songs and it was shipped off to the BBC, who apperently didn't understand it either
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Lighter
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 08:46 AM
Thanks, Brian, for the clarification.
> Favourite story of him has always been of the time he was collecting with Seamus Ennis in the Hebrides, when the women 'waulkers' extemporised a bawdy, verging on obscene song on his masculine attributes in Scots Gaelic.
Fascinating, Jim. Can you elaborate? Were most waulking songs bawdy? Why did Lomax become a target? Was he being obnoxious?
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Derek Schofield
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 08:52 AM
Having looked at the video clip mentioned in Brian's email above, I must say that John Lomax had a very poor short-term memory!!
derek
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 09:13 AM
"Were most waulking songs bawdy? "
Not as far as I know - they were made up on the spot to provide a rhythm for the 'fulling' (stretching) of the newly woven Tweed cloth, which was soaked in urine.
The work was done by women sitting around a table in the open-air and singing to prove a rhythm for the work, sort of like shanty-singing.
I understand that by the time Lomax and Ennis did their recording, sometime in the early 1950s, the practice had ceased in that particular area and ws revivd for the recordists
Nice reproduction here:
WAULKING
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Lighter
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 09:20 AM
Thanks, Jim. If the songs weren't usually bawdy, the targeting of Lomax is especially remarkable.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 10:07 AM
"the targeting of Lomax is especially remarkable."
Both Ennis and Lomax (Ennis in particular) were said to have been extremely attractive to women in their younger days - could never see it myself!
Another story - also attributed to Vance Randolph - tells of a group of students and researchers assembled to meet and interview one of the great field singers (both Aunt Molly Jackson's and Sarah Ogan Gunning's names are bandied about).
It was said that they gathered in Lomax's New York apartment (in the version I heard) and sprawled about the room at the feet of the singer, who was said to also have a reperoire of very bawdy Jack Tales, which she refused to tell in the presence of a tape-recorder, but agreed to tell just for entertainment that evening.
One of the company hid his microphone in the air-conditioning vent and left his machine running - the ruse lasted only a short time, until somebody decided the room was too stuffy and turned the a/c system on.
As I said, an apocryphal story
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 11:11 AM
Jim's story about Aunt Molly Jackson reminds me of something that Hoot once told me about the Virginian bluesman John Jackson. It seems that John's wife kept a book of bawdy stories by the frontdoor. When annyone came to listen to John she would firstly show them the book. If they laughed they were invited in. If not, they were shown the door. On another occasion I was told that a fiddle player in North Carolina only let me record him because of what I said when he offered me some moonshine. I think that I said something like, "Great...is there any more?" Apparently, had I refused and said that I did not approve, then I too would have been shown the door!
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 11:56 AM
"I remember reading John Lomax's 'Adventures of a Ballad Hunter' and getting a great deal of pleasure from it, while at the same time, cringing a little at some of the attitudes reflected." John Lomax was born in 1867 and Alan Lomax was born in 1915. So it's not surprising that they differed in their progressiveness.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Lighter
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 12:26 PM
The elder Lomax was born in Mississippi in 1867 and raised in Texas from 1869. That you cringed at only "some" of his attitudes says something about even John Lomax's relative progressivism.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 12:41 PM
"That you cringed at only "some" of his attitudes says something about even John Lomax's relative progressivism."
Absolutely - the point I was making was about the times and surroundings these people were living in not being taken into consideration
Sharp's language when talking about 'n****r" instruments is often taken as a reason to denigrate his work (I hope I'm not getting that wrong Mike!).
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Mrrzy
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 01:18 PM
Patronization is an ambiguous term, since it means both going to their restaurants and talking down to them... Sorry for the pedantry but it's an important difference given the topic.
I wonder what the Studio 360 people think about our conversation about their piece. I wonder if they are reading it.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 01:40 PM
I sent another tweet.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 02:45 PM
I have mentioned Cecil Sharp's attitudes to black people in my Musical Traditions article "Cecil Sharp in America". Jim is right to say that we have to take into account the fact that times have changed and, with them, attitudes. I was a student in Manchester in the early 1960's and my grandmother once came to stay with me. My next-door neighbours were Africans from Ghana (the father was studying to be a doctor, I recall) and once, when we left the house, the family's young daughter was playing outside by the door. My grandmother went up to the girl, patted her on the head, and said, "What a beautiful picanninie." Not a word that I would have used, but to somebody brought up in the late 1800's when such words were in every-day usage, I suppose that I have to accept that she was only using a word that she felt was appropriate.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Brian Peters
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 03:04 PM
Sharp generally referred to African-Americans as 'negroes' - which I understand was an acceptable term at that time. He used the more offensive term Jim alluded to when describing a visit to Winston Salem, and that passage doesn't make for comfortable reading. Wishful thinkers might prefer to imagine that he was adopting the language of a white acquaintance on that occasion. I also recall coming across a passage in his diary (possibly before leaving New York for the first mountain expedition) where he expressed derision at the notion that black people might make 'folk music'. Of course, given Sharp's narrow concept of 'folk song', that may not be surprising. He also expressed a distaste for ragtime.
Definitely not acceptable by today's standards. How forgivable it is in the context of Sharp's era is something to debate.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 04:31 PM
I can confirm Mike Yates's story above regarding John Jackson's wife Cora but she did invite us in before producing the book which in fact was a compiliation of her own bawdy tales which someone had collected from her and put into print. Once we passed the test she related some more. She had a great sense of humour and was a lovely lady and served up a great supper and breakfast.
Re your piccaninny story Mike it is a generational thing, common among my parent's generation too. My mother and sister and others in the tailoring trade also used the term n---er to describe a shade of brown in coats and dresses. It was a common term.
PC changes much quicker these days and to be honest I don't know the acceptable term right now. Only last week an English film actor got in the neck from the press for using the "wrong" term.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Lighter
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 04:57 PM
> I don't know the acceptable term right now.
Ask enough people in the US, and you'll discover that *no* term is universally acceptable.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 05:06 PM
"I also recall coming across a passage in [Sharp's] diary... where he expressed derision at the notion that black people might make 'folk music'. Of course, given Sharp's narrow concept of 'folk song', that may not be surprising." Well, Chapter Two of Dorothy Scarborough's 1925 book showed that he wouldn't have a leg to stand on there no matter how narrow he was supposedly being.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Feb 15 - 09:43 PM
Brian and Fred...The song you refer to "The Sweet Sunny South" ...you mentioned a few times "the other Civil War version"....just to say that the "other version" is in fact, a totally different song...It's a Confederate song called "The Bright Sunny South".
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: meself
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 12:05 AM
"Sharp generally referred to African-Americans as 'negroes' - which I understand was an acceptable term at that time."
I should think so - it was acceptable, if not preferred, where I lived (beside Detroit) well into the 1970s, as I recall. In fact, I don't think it has ever been considered derogatory - just baggage-laden.
I wonder if we can get past the pearl-clutching at the politically-incorrect lingo and even sentiments of the giants of a hundred years ago? There seems to be this assumption that we all would have been so much more enlightened had we lived back then - and would have done folksong-collecting RIGHT!
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 03:09 AM
I grew up in a strongly anti-racist household, and would have been shown the door had I expressed racist views, yet members of my family would enthusiastically join in and sing 'Lilac Trees', which involves a "curly-headed piccanniny" being told to "stay in his own back-yard" - I believe they got the song from Paul Robeson.
As a babe-in-arms, I understand I was handed to Paul Robeson by my mother to be kissed, when he spoke at an anti-fascist meeting on a piece of waste ground in the centre of Liverpool.
Different language for a different time.
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 04:08 AM
I think most people are missing the point of this article/piece. That's partly the fault of its vague/sensational title, and the off-track comments of Don Flemmons at the end, followed by the use of Reece's softening comments on how "we are all biased" (or something to that effect). (It seems possible that Flemmons also did not quite get the points the critics were raising either, or his statements were quoted from a tangential part of the interview conversation -- hence the non sequitur appearance of remarks.) This evident desire to defend Lomax's legacy (picked up on by Janie) just keeps taking it off track even more—on to Cecil Sharp, on to What Black People Were Called Back in My Day (a "favourite" Mudcat subject), yada yada.
The point of interest is that how Lomax represented Black Americans directly and, more so, how he indirectly represented them through his focus, selection, and presentation of their music, contributed to (although was certainly not solely responsible for) how successive generations of people would come to view the landscape of American music. That this view is at odds with certain evidence of a reality in which "Black" and "White" musical practices were not marked so sharply is cause to flag Lomax's activities, so extensive as they were, as one notable influence.
One of the things behind Lomax's less-than-ideal representation was the concept he had of "folk" music. The narrative of "authenticity" and "purity" runs through Lomax's work, even up to his Cantometrics days when he used the fear of "cultural grey out" to garner support for his impossibly broad conclusions, and when he'd go on about "Pygmy" music being the most pure and primitive/origin music or whatever. (This is why Flemmons' comment about how he himself doesn't care about authenticity makes no sense in this context. It's not Flemmons' idea of authenticity that's at issue, but rather Lomax's.)
The issue is not whether Lomax was negatively prejudiced against Black people. Clearly he was not in any substantive way. So defense of his character in that respect is unnecessary. If anything, he was someone who could fit into the hipster/"White Negro" scene…if only jazz wasn't so damn elitist and inauthentic! And yes, those people were often patronizing (inadvertently), but so what? Indeed, it was a different time.
The issue is that this concept of "folk" —the Sharp-variety, pseudo-scholarly concept of folk-- was a lens with which Lomax was carrying on. It's a distorted lens, and so even when he looked at Black people's music with the best of intentions, the view was liable to get distorted. I think the critics in this article would rather Lomax studied/documented the music of Black Americans. But what Lomax actually studied was folk music, and, along with other peoples, Black Americans were subjected to his folk framework.
What makes the case of Lomax of particular interest is that, whereas Sharp's looking through the "folk" lens biased him in favor of English/White people, Lomax's view biased him in favor of African-Americans. Both of these "folk" paths contributed to racializing / essentializing people and music traditions as a BY-PRODUCT of the activity. The American path (Lomax) favored a narrative of "authenticity" that privileged Black people as models of authentic music-making since (as Jon Cruz notes) Frederick Douglass urged abolitionists to listen to the songs of enslaved African-Americans. So the claim that Lomax "segregated" (a horrible choice of word) music is not a smear of Lomax as an anti-Black racist but an observation of the effect of his activities, however intentioned.
Here are two videos of Lomax in action that serve to remind how clumsy he could be at times—it goes without saying that these are cherry-picked, and they don't invalidate the rest of his lovely work, OK, dudes?
This first is just pure silliness. It seems he is trying to get these fellows to recreate what they once used to do, and yet… what was it that Don Flemmons said about "dignity"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzZbPADXD_4
The second, if judged by academic standards, is a straight breach of ethics. Listen to Lomax, when we get to minute 2:14, tell the performer to "Roll over again." The gaze of the camera really seems to delight in seeing Black bodies writhe on the ground. Luckily, the fifer is on board with this whole "folklore preservation" thing and he, as smoothly as possible, tells his compatriots (2:22) something like, "Hey boys, it's time to roll over again!"
http://youtu.be/fwvGlBymhGs?t=48s
Lomax telling Black musicians to roll over in 1978. Need anything more be said?
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 04:15 AM
Thought that this quote, by Alan Lomax, might be worth repeating here. It comes from Marybeth Hamilton's book "In Search of the Blues", Basic Books, New York. 2008, 151 – 52.
"It is a folklorist's illusion that folklore communities are pure, that the pure old tradition is the one most worth studying."
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 04:35 AM
"Lomax telling Black musicians to roll over in 1978. Need anything more be said?"
There's an assumption that the instruction came from Lomax and that was not how the musicians chose to perform - is there any evidence that this was the case?
MacColl used to tell the story of accompanying Lomax to Genoa on one of his trips and sitting in a cafe with a group of tralaleri singers.
The language barrier on that occasion was proving a bit of a problem and Alan was asking one old man what his song was about.
The old man desperately tried to communicate the meaning and, failing to get his message across, stood up, took his penis out and pointed - that's what it was about.
It's interesting to speculate what the reaction would be if the incident had been filmed and circulated!
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Brian Peters
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 06:10 AM
If the NPR programme had presented its arguments as clearly as Gibb Sahib has done, then perhaps we would not all have 'missed the point'. Instead it chose to cloak its academic contributions in a fog of ill-judged sensationalism (segregation, coercion) and the kind of inaccuracy and jaundiced commentary that Joseph Scott nailed so comprehensively at 12.31 on Feb 2.
Cecil Sharp isn't actually 'off the track' at all, since Lomax clearly shared some of his assumptions. When I mentioned Dave Harker in my first post here, I'd already guessed that at least part of the programme's agenda, however crassly expressed, was an attack on the very concept of 'folk music'. That's been kicked around many times on Mudcat, in the context of the English folk revival, but it's interesting to see the same issues cropping up in North America.
However, the argument that '"Black" and "White" musical practices were not marked so sharply' (which, as we've seen, wasn't news to Lomax) seems now to be heading towards the view that a distinctive African American musical tradition didn't exist ("it simply wasn't there", as the programme tells us). Are we now to believe (to use Harker's phraseology) that the Blues is nothing more than 'Fakesong'?
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Lighter
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 07:21 AM
Nice elucidation, Gibb, but Brian is right. If the story was so set up that even we missed the *real* point, what would it have sounded like to the average person who, let's face it, has never even heard of Alan Lomax?
It makes him sound, to me, like a short-sighted, racist bungler who did as much harm as good to musicology and who even played a role in the continuance of racist attitudes.
The best explanation is NPR's ignorance of the Lomaxes and of folksong research generally. And possibly a few other things.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Vic Smith
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 08:09 AM
Here are the opening sentences of Chapter 21 of Shirley Collins' book America Over The Water which in the main is about the famed 1959 Southern Journey collecting trip through America's southern states conducted by Shirley with Alan Lomax:-
THE DRIVE DOWN THROUGH ARKANSAS, MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA and Georgia to reach our last destination of the field trip, St Simons, one of the Georgia Sea Islands, made me aware again how very far from England I was. I saw sights that I never would at home. There were fields full of cotton, snowy white and beautiful to look at, but so painfully thorny to pick. We took a day's sightseeing at the Okefenoke Swamp, we saw further KKK signs outside many towns, we ate, to my shame, in segregated restaurants, swam in segregated pools, and in Georgia we came across a convict chain-gang working at the side of the road.
These sentences were also part of the show which toured extensively and which I was involved in as tour manager and sound man, so I heard then many times. One night, we were driving back home (or to our hotel) and I was reflecting on these words and quoted them back to her and asked her if there was any alternative to a segregated lifestyle in those states at that time. She thought about it for some time then answered, "No. Vic, I don't suppose there was."
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 10:16 AM
"As a babe-in-arms, I understand I was handed to Paul Robeson by my mother to be kissed, when he spoke at an anti-fascist meeting on a piece of waste ground in the centre of Liverpool."
The incident to which Jim Carroll refers happened just after WW2 (1947, I think). It wasn't an anti-fascist meeting as such, although if any fascists had turned up they would have been given very short shrift. What happened was that Robeson was touring the UK and naturally wanted to do a concert in Liverpool. Nobody, in this wonderful enlightened city of ours would give him a theatre. He therefore staged a free concert on a bomb site, along with his pianist. I've no idea where they got the piano from, but it must have been one hell of a job muling the thing over all that rubble.
Personally I've never been too fussed over Robesons' singing, it was a bit too polite for my liking. But what an inspirational figure! Would that we had a hunndred more like him around today.
BTW., Tayo Aluko, a Black African who lives right here in Liverpool will be touring a one man show about Paul Robeson in April, I think. More details here. . I saw it a couple of years ago and it was brilliant and very moving.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Jeff Davis
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 10:47 AM
It is as shame that we couldn't have done Lomax's work for him, or for Sharp, Creighton, Flanders, Fife--all of them. Our work would have been so much more complete, detailed, unprejudiced, unblemished, and unassailable, and unworthy of criticism. Oh, yes, and more energetic.
Pardon me for a lifetime while I get up from the desk, put the instruments in their cases, the books on the shelf, abandon the fine warm house, the consoling relationship to go find, effortlessly, some unheard of music in some far away place and make a stunningly perfect perfect job of it.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 11:24 AM
Thanks Fred
You've just filled a huge gap in my family history
Don't suppose you know about the Mosely rally in Liverpool where my grandmother was arrested for throwing a brick at him which, she said, hit him?
She was a devout Catholic, and it was a family story that she claimed that the brick was "guided by the hand of god".
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 12:17 PM
Thank you, Jeff Davis.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Good Soldier Schweik
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 12:47 PM
Cecil Sharp was a Fabian socialist, in my opinion it is doubtful that he was a racist.
I would be very much surprised if either of the Lomaxes were either
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 01:13 PM
Brian and Lighter,
I am happy to agree that the program/article is flawed and quite so. I suppose I am thinking more of the people whose ideas were surveyed to create it. Just as we can understand that Lomax's thinking was not all black-and-white (no pun intended)—of course it wasn't—we can also be a little more generous with the museum people and academics whose ideas are quoted. This, indeed, would have been the purpose of why they put the quotes from the Smithsonian person at the end, a sort of disclaimer. By then, however, the hackles were already raised! :-)
Brian, you might be right that these people have an issue with the concept of "folk music." I do (if that's not obvious!). That's very different, however, from claiming that the music traditions that a person might view as folk do not exist. I believe blues exists and that English ballads exist. I don't think the so-called "scientific" concept of "folk" (to use Sharp's language) is a necessary or productive way to study those musics. I think the concept is a product of the modern era, a meta-narrative inspired by other modern ideas like nationalism and natural selection (Darwin mis-applied) and anti-urbanization. And I feel that this concept of folk—although not necessarily the word "folk" itself, with other casual/practical use—is not compatible with scholarship. Similarly, the evolutionist ideas of the early "comparative musicologists" (antecedents to ethnomusicology) are not acceptable to current scholarship—even if they did get the ball rolling and worked with a lot of recordings, for which we are grateful. (Lomax was a bit of a throwback to the old comparative musicologists, which is one reason why his ideas did not catch on with many contemporary American ethnomusicologists—as they had gone through a painful process of digging themselves out from the Comparative Musicology mold and trying to gain some disciplinary credibility by disassociating with its assumptions.
The program notes that the critics are all about the same age, and I suspect that I am roughly in their generation, too. It is no surprise that we all tend to be wary of the narratives of the modern era. We can't really help it :-)
Brian's statement, "it's interesting to see the same issues cropping up in North America. [as in England]" is, in my opinion, exactly where the interest does lie in this topic. Whether or not you subscribe to the folk concept, you can get something out of seeing out it played out in U.S. vs. U.K. I don't think one can deny that application of this concept, which drove several Modern Men, created a new musical landscape (rather than just helping to describe/understand it -- the preferred goal of scholarship).
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: RTim
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 01:37 PM
Brilliant Jeff Davis - as always!
Tim Radford
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 02:40 PM
Hi Gibb (and Felipa),
Authenticity isn't pretend. Things are authentically whatever all the time. E.g., "Hop Joint" is authentically a song John Hurt learned before 1910 from another amateur musician, while his "Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me" isn't. There is nothing intrinsically suspect about being interested in authenticity.
To give another example: was jazz authentic old-time music? It was not. Anyone who noticed that jazz was not old-time music, such as Alan Lomax, was noticing right.
Can you explain to me why I should think Alan trying to collect what I call folk music, and in fact collecting what I call folk music, had (what) negative to it which involved anyone's concept of "folk music"?
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Oh, For Crying Out Loud......
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 03:28 PM
"Only last week an English film actor got in the neck from the press for using the "wrong" term."
Indeed -- and the term he used was "Coloured". Now, just remind us, please: what does the C stand for in NAACP?
Are they planning to change their name, anyone know?
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Phil
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 06:22 PM
Euro-American history of Africana and Euro-American historians of Africana will be revised. Permission or approval is neither required nor particularly desired.
"For Lomax, the locus of authentic black expression was best found in prisons. "The black communities were just too difficult to work in with any efficiency and so my father had the great idea that probably all of the sinful people were in jail," Lomax once said"
Translation: Slaves are cheaper and easier to stereotype than free men, (Americans check your state constitutions for prison slavery exemptions viz emancipation.) Lomax was a Federal employee. The guards were State employees. Most blacks still view prisons as government plantations. The inmates are not sinners. They are slaves. Corvée was still in practice in the south and by the USMC in Haiti.
As I write, the John Muir name is just about resigned to the trash heap of history. Chickens coming home to roost, like the man said.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 07:49 PM
To not let this go too far afield, the NAACP was founded in 1909 by a liberal group including W.E.B. DuBois (probably the best known of that group today), using a term in use at the time and the group has seen fit not to alter. The mission statement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination." It isn't actually just for African American/Black participation, though that is the majority defacto membership at this time. That could change, and that said, it represents many colors.
Back to the topic at hand.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 13 Feb 15 - 08:04 PM
Jim,
There's an assumption that the instruction came from Lomax and that was not how the musicians chose to perform - is there any evidence that this was the case?
The video *is* the evidence. (?) You can see Lomax go over to Napoleon and shout in his ear, "Roll over again."
Jeff,
"Nobody's perfect" is true, but that is no reason not to engage in *constructive* criticism. You can't really expect scholars to just chill and not criticize--it's part of the process of what they do.
***
A milestone in the critique of past ethnographers' work was the publication (ca. late 1960s) of Polish-British anthropologist Malinowski's field diary of decades earlier. The story roughly goes that Malinowski was idealized by many as a model ethnographer, who was particularly sensitive to the people and culture he studied. However, his diary contain some candid expressions of how felt about people he worked with. Instead of anthropologists caving in and denouncing Malinowski as "racist," etc., they vowed to think a bit more carefully about how their biases influenced their work, to be more open about them.
This is the blessing of the post-humous access made to Lomax's material. Scholars will continue to benefit from Lomax's documentation, but they will be more conscious of the fact that if a guy shook his ass in the camera and rolled over on the ground -- gestures that seem to confirm stereotypes about "Black" sexuality, abandonment, and so forth -- it may have been because Lomax had selected and influenced the set up of such scenes. Non-scholar performers are completely free to continue to get enjoyment and inspiration from these (edited) scenes, and the sphere of activity will go on developing according to people's expectations of what is genuine, what is "Black," what is "White," etc. You go your way and people with other goals -- such as those interested in revising the representation of Black Americans, or distinguishing constructed ideas of "Blackness" from African-American people -- will do their thing.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 14 Feb 15 - 03:03 AM
"You can see Lomax go over to Napoleon and shout in his ear, "Roll over again."
It really doesn't prove that Lomax created something that wasn't already happening.
I can remember being very disturbed and also, very moved by a magnificent T.V series back in the 70s/80s entitled 'Beats of the Heart', which showed world traditions at their best and sometimes at their worst.
It is to be deplored if Lomax actually created and filmed something that didn't already exist - it is quite another if he sought to get the best filmed examples of what was already happening.
It's like the old Joe Heaney argument about whether MacColl and Seeger put words in Joe's mouth when they interviewed him back in the sixties.
Joe's account of how he approached traditional singing was so powerful and so important that the MacColl knockers and the "free as birdsong" crowd suggested that MacColl choreographed the interview to make a point.
Not long before he died, we spent some time with Heaney and found that not only was the interview an accurate view of his attitude to singing, but we were left with the impression that he was the last person in the world to allow himself himself to be manipulated by a collector.
I'm not suggesting that you do so, but it's somewhat patronising to suggest that musicians and singers lay themselves open to being depicted as trained monkeys for the benefit of the camera or the microphone.
Over the thirty-odd years we spent collecting, particularly from Irish Travellers, we recorded a number of things we believed didn't show our friends (that's what many of them became) in a particularly good light.
We took the decision not to use that material publicly (sometimes after a discussion with the people involved), but to archive it with a proviso that it should not be made public without our permission.
There is a well-known example of collectors publishing material they have recorded from an informant (rotten word), only to find that it gave offence to other members of that community
The collectors were accused of faking the information in order to get the original informant out of a spot.
Parts of John Cohen's impressive film of Dillard Chandler, 'End of an Old Song' is, to say the least, controversial - there's no suggestion that he faked it.
Whether he should have used everything he was given is a different argument altogether.
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Mike Yates.
Date: 14 Feb 15 - 05:59 AM
Agree with Jim. I held onto a good version of the song "Old Johnny Bigger", one that I recorded from a singer in Oxfordshire 40 odd years ago, but could never bring myself to issue it because of its use of the word which rhymes with "bigger".
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Vic Smith
Date: 14 Feb 15 - 09:58 AM
The changing uses and implications of "coloured" and "black" are just one of many examples of how the meaning of words alter - even within living memory. I'll give you a personal example:-
My wife, Tina, had long been singing Gathering Rushes. Then she seemed to stop singing it and I requested her to sing it again because I always thought that she made a good job of it.
She said that she had stopped singing it because she was having difficulty with the lines which are from the angry father.
"Well, was it by a black man,
Or was it by a brown?.....
I told her that I remembered a conversation between two of my aunts in Edinburgh when I was very young. One of them is trying to describe a man that she feels she should know, She is asked:-
"Is yon man a brown man or is he black?"
My ears pricked up; we did not see people from different countries in our part of Edinburgh and my interest had been caught.
"Naw, naw!" came the answer. "he's completely bauld!"
I told Tina that I had always thought that was what the lines in the song meant. Soon she was singing the song again with the lines now:-
"Well, was it by a black-haired man,
Or was it by a brown?.....
.... and when I was a wee laddie in Edinburgh a person that was gay was bright, cheerful and happy.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,HiLo
Date: 14 Feb 15 - 10:28 AM
"The past is a foregin country , they do things differently there." L. P. Hartley. All I can say on the subject.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 14 Feb 15 - 12:19 PM
"Are we now to believe... that the Blues is nothing more than 'Fakesong'?" Only if you're talking to a pseudointellectual handwaver.
Black folk songs about having the "blues," some of them in 12-bar form, were around by 1907 and 1908 (Howard Odum, Antonio Maggio).
The publication of blues songs began in 1912.
Although the idea that blues music might have been developed on modest stages and then taken up in the streets is interesting to imagine, thorough research by the likes of Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff, and Henry Sampson had turned up no actual support for that idea. People who were old enough to know, people about W.C. Handy's age, didn't suggest that pros who worked in tent shows and the like were involved in the earliest blues, they recalled blues as arising among, as Handy put it, "the underprivileged... class."
There were many black-run periodicals (yes, there were many black-run periodicals) and other print sources that routinely mentioned e.g. ragtime during the years before 1909. In contrast, the earliest reference to blues as a type of music in print is from 1909 (in Louisiana). At that time Maggio had _already_ heard a black guitarist on a levee perform a 12-bar piece the guitarist called "I Got The Blues" back in 1907 (in Louisiana), Emmet Kennedy had already heard a variant of "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home" sung by blacks in the streets (in Louisiana), and Buddy Bolden had already reportedly played the tune that is sometimes known as "2:19 Blues" (in Louisiana). There is plenty of real evidence supporting the idea that blues music arose as folk music, and no real evidence that blues music arose as anything but folk music.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Lighter
Date: 14 Feb 15 - 01:08 PM
> when I was a wee laddie in Edinburgh a person that was gay was bright, cheerful and happy.
And let's not forget "The Streets of Laredo":
"Once in the saddle I used to go dashing,
Once in the saddle I used to go gay."
No longer singable.
"Don we now our gay apparel" is now sung in U.S. elementary schools as
"...fine apparel."
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 14 Feb 15 - 01:49 PM
re Jim Carroll's request for information about the bricking of Oswald Mosley. I have no direct information about this incident, beyond the fact that I know it happened.
Somewhere I have seen a series of newsreel shots, which show Mosley stepping out from the back of his van, being hit with a brick, and collapsing like a house cards. I can't give a definite source for that, but the most likely one is probably Robert Skidelsky's biography of Mosley. I'm glad that I was once able to satisfy a veteran anti-fascist on that point, after he'd declared to me that he'd never known whether it was true or not.
I know this might sound vindictive, although not to anyone who knows how violent the blackshirts were, but I wish there was an annual commemoration of the event. However, that I'm afraid, is par for the course in a city, which has such an appalling Labour administration. For example, you can walk right across the city of Liverpool in any direction and you will not find a single memorial to James Larkin. All we have to remember the greatest labour leader Liverpool ever produced is a back street in Kirkdale, which was named after him. It's called James Larkin Way.
Imagine the smell of soiled underwear if Jimmy Anderson, our so-called 'Labour' mayor woke up one morning to find that the masses had taken to streets, demanding an end to his austerity programme.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Brian Peters
Date: 14 Feb 15 - 04:04 PM
Good posts, Gibb Sahib. Good discussion all round, in fact.
"I don't think the so-called "scientific" concept of "folk" is a necessary or productive way to study those musics. I think the concept is a product of the modern era, a meta-narrative inspired by other modern ideas like nationalism and natural selection (Darwin mis-applied) and anti-urbanization.
To some extent this is now a historical issue. Do even the most steadfast defenders of the 'folk' concept believe it has nationalist connotations? You don't hear a lot any more about the evolutionary analogy either, although the conflict of 'continuity' versus 'variation' still has its uses IMO. Personally I view 'folk music' simply as music that untrained people make for their own pleasure and entertainment. Opportunities for collection (at least in our two nations) are shrinking anyway.
However, the NPR programme (and we all agree on its shortcomings) did more than criticize Lomax for partial adherence to flawed Sharpian concepts. It suggested that, in playing down the commonality between white and black vernacular music, and stressing the importance of blues music in particular to African American culture, Lomax misrepresented that culture. When I asked whether certain critics regard blues as 'fakesong' I was asking whether there is a strand of US academic opinion that believes that, for every Son House and Fred McDowell, there were a hundred African Americans serenading their peers with 'By the Light of the Silvery Moon' and 'Happy Days are Here Again'? It was a serious question.
Thanks to Joseph Scott for information on early blues that tells me it wasn't all got up by Lomax.
Lastly, I've looked at the two Youtube clips linked by Gibb a few posts ago, and have difficulty interpreting them in the same way.
The men 'rocking the load' seem to be in a set-up no different from retired sailors, presented with a block and tackle, and asked to demonstrate hauling up the mainsail to the accompaniment of a shanty. Neither do I see the fife player in the 'roll over' clip 'shaking his ass' or presenting a sexual display. Just goes to show we can look at the same thing and not see the same thing.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 15 Feb 15 - 06:40 AM
Personally I view 'folk music' simply as music that untrained people make for their own pleasure and entertainment.
A sentiment with which I agree wholeheartedly. Too much bullshit written by too many "academics".
Argue as much as you wish about various collectors and their methods but just be thankful that they did collect what they did and we have a chance to hear it
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Vic Smith
Date: 15 Feb 15 - 06:59 AM
Argue as much as you wish about various collectors and their methods but just be thankful that they did collect what they did and we have a chance to hear it
Of course this statement is totally correct and where would we be without their vastly important work. However, in some cases, with some individuals, feelings about their legacy has been affected by the morality of their approach and methods.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Feb 15 - 07:51 AM
"Personally I view 'folk music' simply as music that untrained people make for their own pleasure and entertainment. "
Simply not the case on both counts - there are indications that cultures with a strong folk tradition had their own methods of training their singers and storytellers.
As far as music and dance was concerned, that training was formalised by the existence of 'dancing masters' who taught both dancing skills and mastery of instruments - this area had two of them withing the living memory of singers we recorded.
The cultural baggage that song brings with it makes it far too complex to write off as simply "entertainment".
One of the great problems with drawing conclusions about the part that song played in the lives of the communities is that we have very little real information from the point of view of the singers - very few collectors recorded anything other than the songs.
I don't know how available the interview Lomax and MacColl did with Harry Cox, but there really is very little to compare with it in importance.
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Brian Peters
Date: 15 Feb 15 - 08:10 AM
'untrained'
Point 1 taken, Jim. I was thinking of formal musical training, but certainly in the case of instrumental music there were village musicians two hundred years ago well capable of reading dots. Not too many singers, though, I suspect. I could have said 'non-professional' but there are problems with that, too. I should know better than to get sucked into the definition game.
Point 2 - doesn't 'entertainment' include cultural baggage anyway? Maybe we don't know enough about the opinions of singers, but most of the traditional singing that I've heard seems designed to 'entertain', in the broader sense of the word (= 'diverting', 'holding the attention' etc).
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Feb 15 - 09:09 AM
"Point 2 - doesn't 'entertainment' include cultural baggage anyway?"
Depends - I would rather put it the other way round and say cultural baggage includes entertainment.
The songs we have been dealing with among Irish singers certainly include 'entertaining' pieces, but they also include laments, nationalist rallying cries, outcries of anger at evictions, the Famine, forced emigration, items of local and national history... a whole host of other subjects, alongside Child ballads, songs from the English and Scottish rural repertoires, Irish made pieces picked up from ballad sheets.....
One of the subjects we have never fully come to terms with is the locally made repertoire, a large body of almost entirely anonymous songs made locally and never moving outside the immediate area of this small, one-street town.
One 94 year-old singer summed it up perfectly lat year when he told us; "if a man farted in church, someone made a song about it".
Sure, these are "entertainment, but they were much more than that to the people who learned them (some didn't even sing them, they just wrote them down)
Today, I firmly believe they are an important part of local social history, often unrecorded elsewhere.
Jim Carroll
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 16 Feb 15 - 02:38 PM
"When I asked whether certain critics regard blues as 'fakesong' I was asking whether there is a strand of US academic opinion that believes that, for every Son House and Fred McDowell, there were a hundred African Americans serenading their peers with 'By the Light of the Silvery Moon' and 'Happy Days are Here Again'? It was a serious question."
I can't think of a single U.S. academic who likes to go on about how compromised black folk music was by pop music who... really knows black folk music (!). (By that I mean, who could tell you e.g. that the first-person songs similar to "Hop Joint" seem to have been transitional between the 1890s 12-bar third-person songs and the first-person songs of about 1908 mentioning quote "blues," for instance. Which I bet you some people like Newman White or Abbe Niles _had_ noticed by 1930, and I bet you the likes of Norm Cohen or Peter Muir has ever thought about. Because it's not exactly that hard to notice if you're actually interested in black folk music -- an interest that for about a half century now _isn't_ all that fashionable relative to anything involving both (1) blues and (2) white people.)
Maybe someone else can think of someone, though.
Making a show of doubting your forebears, without revealing the other thing that you've figured out really happened (because you don't know what really happened) has been fashionable in the last couple decades. With big vocabulary words. A number of books will mention that Alan Lomax, for instance, skewed our perceptions about music, without really saying how, because that's a lot more difficult to figure out than just making that vague claim.
It was normal for a black Southerner to be interested in both folk music and published pop songs. If a person knew, say, both "Railroad Bill" and "After The Ball," are we supposed to believe that that compromised "Railroad Bill" as folk music somehow? I don't.
Regarding folk blues, let me give you a concrete example of how rich blues was a folk tradition independently of the influence of published blues songs or recordings of black blues singers. Lemon Jefferson's "Wartime Blues," e.g., is an example of a 16-bar blues with AAAB lyrics. Sixteen-bar blues had chord progressions similar to I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-V-I-I. That is, very similar to typical 12-bar but extended with one extra line of lyrics in there.
AAAB was the most common lyric form for 16-bar blues with that chord progression, but other forms such as ABBB were sometimes used. The sixteen-bar blues chord progression was also popular in instrumentals.
We know that 16-bar blues peaked in popularity overall some time in the 1910s, because we know that blues in general weren't all that popular yet as of 1909, and we know that 12-bar had managed to dominate 16-bar tremendously by 1920. (Newman White born 1892 suggested, apparently rightly, that the two most common forms of lyrics in blues as of the 1910s were AAB and AAAB.)
Examples of musicians who were familiar with the 16-bar blues form are Blind Lemon Jefferson, Rev. Gary Davis, Leadbelly, Peg Leg Howell, Mance Lipscomb, Bo Carter, Furry Lewis, Charley Jordan, Robert Hicks, Big Bill Broonzy, Henry Thomas, Jesse Fuller, William Moore, Elvie Thomas, Walter Vinson, Pink Anderson, Reese Crenshaw, Thomas Burt, Jim Baxter, Will Shade, Daddy Stovepipe, Skip James, Robert Wilkins, Thomas Shaw, Henry "Rufe" Johnson, John Bray, Bob Coleman, Bobby Grant, Richard Williams, Elester Anderson, Freeman Stowers, and Wiley Barner, among many others.
These musicians typically performed 16-bar blues in an extremely similar fashion to 12-bar blues.
Sixteen-bar blues never caught on among pro songwriters (Handy had little interest in them, and other pro songwriters copied him). Recording black blues singers only became fashionable in 1920 and 1921.
Thus, all those names above point to an era, the 1910s, when 16-bar blues were massively popular among Southern blacks but the pro entertainment industry, which hadn't invented 16-bar blues, wasn't yet taking much interest in 16-bar blues, and never would. An era when _folk_ blues -- by people who acted as though it didn't matter much whether a blues was 16-bar or 12-bar and often mixed both in the same piece -- were massively popular in the South.
(What all that has to do with Mr. Son House, who by his own account got interested in blues music in about 1920 and took up the guitar in about 1925, is not as much as some writers on Son House would like you to believe.)
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Brian Peters
Date: 17 Feb 15 - 06:53 AM
I think that goes some way towards anwering my question, JS.
"It was normal for a black Southerner to be interested in both folk music and published pop songs. If a person knew, say, both "Railroad Bill" and "After The Ball," are we supposed to believe that that compromised "Railroad Bill" as folk music somehow? I don't."
No more than music hall songs in an English traditional singer's repertoire would have compromised his or her Child ballads. Though Jim Carroll has explained before on this forum that singers he knew did draw a distinction between the older and newer songs in their repertoire.
Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Racist stereotypes&all/NPR
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 17 Feb 15 - 08:43 AM
"Though Jim Carroll has explained before on this forum that singers he knew did draw a distinction between the older and newer songs in their repertoire."
An interesting incident regarding this when we were recording the travellers
We recorded a singer (Brian knows who he is) with a repertoire of ballads and narrative songs in a somewhat run-down sean nós style, - he had learned his songs and picked up the singing style from his father.
His brother sang Country and Western songs, but had also picked up his father's songs, which he sang like his C & W stuff, so you got The Outlandish Kinight and The Grey Cock sung in true Hank Williams renditions.
Oe night we were in a pub with a crowd of Travellers and the subject of the brothers' singing came up - the room divided into which had the "best renditions" and the room divided into two opposing (and somewhat vehement) parties
All more-or-less agreed that the singer who sang like his father had "the Traveller" style - the argument was largely about taste.
We were asked to adjudicate, and somewhat hastily declined.
Blind Travelling woman, Mary Delaney, gave us well over 100 songs, most of them narrative and several Child ballads among them.
She could have easily doubled that number with Country and Western songs, but throughout the five years or so we knew her, she refused point-blank to sing them, telling us; "they're not what you are looking for; I only sing them old things because that's what the lads ask me for down in the pub"
What we would call traditional, she described as "my daddie's songs - when we recorded her father, he gave us six songs - she was referring to the type of song, not their source.Not discriminating between differ
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