The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #83054   Message #1524944
Posted By: greg stephens
21-Jul-05 - 06:42 AM
Thread Name: Most Successful (NAFF) Folk Songs
Subject: RE: Most Successful (NAFF) Folk Songs
It is interesting that every single item in this list is the product of a modern singer-songwriter or similar. Not one song, in fact, that would be classified as a folk song by a large number(perhaps a substantial majority) of Mudcatters. In fact I would suggest that it is virtually impossible for a folksong to be twee...in the process of becoming a folksong the tweeness will have been removed by the successive hands it has passed through on its way to actual "folk status".
    Before anyone points out a song such as "Strawberry Fair" as an example: yes , the Strawberry Fair some of us were taught at school was unbearably twee. But the tweeness lay in the delivery, which is a product of the teachers, and aslo in the words, which were not folk at all but a cleaned-up version prepared for young children.