The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #18568 Message #184780
Posted By: GUEST,Jim Dixon
25-Feb-00 - 01:29 PM
Thread Name: Doing research: need help!! women in trad music
Subject: RE: Doing research: need help!!
You have a logical problem here. A purist would say: a song can't be classified as "traditional" unless no one knows who wrote it; therefore your first question is impossible to answer. Some more productive questions might be these: (1) What women have written music in a traditional style? (2) Have there been any female folk song collectors and publishers? (Certainly the best known ones, e.g. Cecil Sharp, Alan Lomax, Vance Randolph, were male.) (3) What songs were traditionally sung (and transmitted) more by women than men? (Certainly Sharp et al. had lots of informants who were female.) (4) In what social contexts did women sing and teach songs to one another (apart from men)? (5) How are women portrayed in traditional songs? Are they portrayed differently depending on the context, or depending on whether the singer is male or female?