Jim -

I see your point, and agree about the narrative aspect of traditional song. In fact, for me as a singer the words are vital. I can and do love many traditional fiddle and banjo tunes, and play some of them. Nevertheless, the lyrics are vital, and I'll always be a singer of good songs (and some delightfully bad ones) first and foremost. I love and sing the lengthy ballads from "Lord Randall" (a Virginia version) to "The Comrades' Last Brave Charge" and many other songs that have stories attached. So I am a partisan highly in favor of what you say.

Indeed I have been worried about the same thing you cite: how readily young players steer clear of traditional singing, instead rushing to traditional tunes! They play them with reasonably good and sometimes outstanding style, though too many tend toward a virtuosity that can destroy the feeling of the older styles. By contrast, some young players do loosen up old tunes that had traditionally been played in stodgy fashion, so it works both ways. Tunes are the draw, not words. Is this because, since traditional style became reinstituted as a virtue in the folkie community, they're finding the vocal slope too steep? Or do they just not think much of words, due perhaps to rock's heavy emphasis on beat and melody?

Here in America, as in Britain, real exponents of traditional singing are few, and of these nearly none are satisfying. I find myself preferring to listen to field recordings from the 1920s and 30s rather than all but a very few of the finest contemporaries. All too rare are moments like that in the film "Songcatcher" where a fledgling Emmy Rossum as well as the peerless Iris DeMent briefly capture the true feel and sound of Appalachian traditional singing! (All honors, too, to the fine traditional singer Sheila Kay Adams, who made sure it happened that way...and perdition to the numbskulls who put out the ensuing CD ripoff with pop singers.)

All you've said about the decline of narrative song is true, and lamentable. Many say it's inevitable given our alternate sources of narrative that overwhelm the instinct. Singers a hundred years ago had little access to books and newspapers, with radio barely beginning and TV and the internet in the distant future. The automobile and highways hadn't had much impact...etc. etc. The story is familiar.

I must say my examples of possible surviving songs were spur-of-the-moment and strictly in fun. But my examples of musical genres that might throw up survivals were a little more serious. I do see survivals arising out of current music here in Yankland if not in Britain. (Granted neither you nor I may enjoy them, still I think they're bound to come!)

A trend already underway may show what could happen. The Smithsonian Institute has long sponsored folk festivals across the US, starting up a new one in a new city each year, and leaving behind a legacy of organization to produce festivals going on into the future. In nearby Lowell, Massachusetts, the yearly festival must now be something like a quarter century old and amazingly strong. It features folk artists from all possible cultures, including strong local Cambodian music and dance.

But the hottest items at those festivals inevitably are the more contemporary sounds, from the Sun Records revival band to electric Cajun rock. Hearing "Great Balls of Fire" blare from folk festival speakers is entertaining, and maybe presenting it as "folk" makes sense from a longterm standpoint -- it's become vernacular music, in some sense, I guess. So has bluegrass, for all its pop-country yearnings. Conversely, some other traditions keep to the old styles, from Portuguese fado with traditional guitarra accompaniment to what's left of American singing with oldtime banjo picking (rarely much good). Trouble is, the few performers in traditional style are swamped by the louder, catchier, more pop-monolithic forms of music that have long enjoyed the advantage of commercial backing and studio-airwaves style.

Is this inevitable? Back in the 1970s when the American oldtime music craze hit big, fans noticed that again and again, American pop music after about 20 to 40 years enters the traditional repertoire. Singers incorporated the songs of the 1880s through about 1910 in recordings of the 1920s. (Granted, as you say, this didn't happen to any great extent in other parts of the English-speaking world -- though Canada and Australia did develop their own 1930s "old time music" derived from American approaches, and some of the records were sold in Britain, they never created significant markets for vocal narrative music.)

In America a Charlie Poole, or an Uncle Dave Macon with a somewhat older repertoire -- both breakaway entertainers with a sizable repertoire of traditional and older popular music -- embodied this principle. But fast forward to today, and similar survivals seem less digestible. The pace of musical change has accelerated so much that very little 20- to 40-year-old music (1960s-80s) fits any conceivable folk style.

For England I defer to your greater knowledge, but clearly the musical world of the 19th-century villager and farmer has vanished more abruptly than in America. It was a lucky break that Bob and Ron Copper, as well as those you cite, survived long enough to impress moderns with their authentic songs and styles. Still, for modern singers trying to carry on English tradition, there has been a real break in continuity. It had to be filled in from about 1950 by a vigorous BBC and club revival effort (paralleling that in America) that would appear to have lost vitality over the years.

It's very much a matter of creating a community anew. That A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl did their share of that beginning in the 1950s shows it can be done, but it takes energy, pluck and real dedication to traditional song. It's never a mass phenomenon, may even be tough to persist in. But this thread is scattered through with names -- examples most recently in Folkiedave's message just above -- who are pushing traditional songs and styles in England and elsewhere in Britain. They're bound to change both song and style in the process, but that's folk music, or so we used to tell ourselves.

I'm still optimistic that (by hook or by crook) some form of English traditional singing will persist. Are teenagers showing up to listen and learn, as happened in the past half century? What are they making of what they hear? It may be a while before they are heard from, but some, I would think, will catch fire from the sheer delight of the songs, and become singers and song carriers themselves. ("Like a virus, caught for the very first time..." -- sorry, couldn't resist that one.)

The danger, of course, is that traditional singing could become solely a professionalized activity, as it has in so many European countries -- a "national resource" embalmed in semi-official "accepted" style and dead as a doornail.

But traditional songs in both England and the US seem to have an idiosyncratic anti-pop magnetism other genres don't have. They attract singers who sing for the love of it, most of them NOT professionally...singers who would sing whether they made any money or not. Folk music's continued vitality will rise or fall, I think, with its ability to attract that kind of amateurs in enough numbers to form some sort of community of like minds.

Bob