Dick,

Randolph is known as & subtitled "The Unprintable Collection" Vol 1 is Roll Me in Your Arms and vol 2 (surprise!) is Blow the Candles Out.

I agree that all three, published in the (19)90's are the first-of-kind. Amazing! cosidering the obscene material that had no trouble being published all those years.

But the notion of females and bawdy material is misleading, I believe. It's both Victorian and Eisenhowera (well, within American Puritanical years' thinking.)

The point is that bawdy songs are, in the main, transmitted by women. I don't know of statistical studies done but a look at Randolph's respondants or Gordon's in the (still unpublished) Inferno collection reveals a very high percent of women. It may be that the really obscene songs, "Christopher Colombo" eg, may be more likely to be from men but the women certainly do their share.

My impression in Scotland was that this might be true there also, both for urban and source sigers. I asked the Scottish scholar Sheila Douglas her feeling and she agreed. She felt bawdy songs were so much within womens' province she wrote and had published a full book of her own self-wrote bawdy songs.

Being very mystical, this may go back to the old notion of women being the sensual/sexual sex, not men. It's only for brief periods (I think) the roles are reversed.

In reading one of Creighton's "sister" collectors in the northeast, Fannie Eckstorm, I felt that the songs were sung to her - she was not able to publish. Eckstorm worked in the out back with Maine loggers, tromping the woods where no woman had trod before. Logger sang dirty songs as did any group of single-sex workers out for months on their own - sailors, cowboys... But she refers to them, same as does Lomax and others.

So, George, as to Creighton, how bawdy is "bawdy?" How mild is "risque?"

In Orlando, if I sing the ballads "Castration of the Strawberry Roan" or "Charlotte the Harlot" or "Kafoosalem" females walk out of the room. So, pragmatically (not legally) in central Florida, they're obscene. If I sing "Blow the Candles Out" nobody blinks, so that's pragmatically risque. If I sing "Bonnie Black Hare" (there's a version in Randolph nearly identical to Carthy's & squoze to the more singable "Molly Mallone") then people consciously & verbally opt to hear it as a hunting song and "allow" it.

As to the other thread, What's Allowed in Your Club, bawdy ain't allowed.

Sigh!