Somewhere buried in a university library is a thesis I wrote almost forty years ago. My guess is no one including me will ever look at it again. The term ethnomusicologist is applied to many who study folk music. Pete Seeger's father and step mother, Ralph Vaughan Williams and, in Canada where I live, Edith Fowlke. What degrees each of these ascholars had, I do not know. Edith Fowlke was a professor, and folk music in Canada and beyond Canada is the richer for her work. Time has a way of forgetting dull songs from dull song writers and also dull scholarship from dull scholars. If one good scholar emerges from these studies then the whole enterprise is justified.
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