Tom,
You are quite right about what section of the singers repertoire should be - I was being over-simplistic in the point I was making; I was talking about when a collector was placed in an either-or situation.
Our early work in West Clare was done (over 20-odd years) during fortnight-long visits here. In those halcyon days it was like being let loose in a sweet-shop, there were so many singers to be recorded and so little time to do it, so we chose initially to head-hunt, go in-record the songs- pull out. This got us a lot of songs, and also gave us some idea of the local repertoire. After a while we became aware of a number of singers who not only had large repertoires, but also had a great deal of information to pass on; so we decided to slow our gallop and concentrate on these in order to carry out in-depth interviews. With these we not only recorded the whole repertoires, but also the singers talking about the varying types of songs, getting them to identify them, etc.
In the end, both here and in England we finally settled on a small number of singers to work with constantly. We met Walter Pardon in 1975 and recorded him regularly until his death in 1996. Also in 1975 we started to record Clare Singer Tom Lenihan and continued to record him annually until his death in 1990. In 1975 (busy year that!) we started to record Traveller singer, storyteller, street singers, ballad seller, horse-dealer, tinsmith - you name it, Mikeen McCarthy. Our last recording of him was done a year before his death in 2004.
It was from these three that the bulk of our information on traditional singing came.
With each of them we recorded the whole repertoire, though I confess we did have some difficulty with Walter who was probably the most articulate on the subject of singing, and was reluctant to sing his non-traditional songs as he did not see any great value in them (we have him speaking at some length on these songs and his attitude to them).
We did work with other singers than these to a lesser degree, but these were the ones we concentrated on, and of course our work included the entire repertoires.
Extremely interesting was Mikeen McCarthy who not only diffentiated between ‘street singing’, ‘pub singing’ and ‘fireside singing’, but, when questioned, described how he ‘got pictures â€" like being in the cinema’ when he sang traditional songs, but didn’t with the rest. Some of our work with Mikeen is covered in the article on him in ‘Singer, Song and Scholar’.
Walter referred to a number of his non-traditional songs as ‘pot-house’ songs’ and also ‘got pictures’ when he sang ‘folk songs’ (his term).
While you are right about collectors’ attitudes changing from the early days, one of the things that encouraged us to work the way we did was the dearth of information from the singers themselves on the act of singing. A little work was done on this, for instance, that done with Texas Gladden (Lomax?), but on this side of the Atlantic such work appears ro be either non-existant (or at least not freely available). The nearest we have appears to be Gower and Porter’s study of Jeannie Robertson, but even that is restricted to Gower’s section based on Jeannie talking of herself and her family background and Porter’s own analysis of the singing.
The small amount we did was probably too little, too late.
Both revival singing and folk song research seems to me to be based entirely on the erroneous notion that trdaitional singers had no opinions worth considering on the various types of songs in their repertoire, which, in the revival seems to have led to the ‘talking horse’ philosophy which has long dominated the club scene.
On the academic side, when we once told one researcher of Walter’s attitude to his songs, the response was “How could he think like that; a simple countryman!â€쳌 We recently used the term for the title of an article we wrote on Walter which has just been published in a festschrift for Tom Munnelly, ‘Dear, Far-voiced Veteran’.
Jim Carroll.