Don Firth - got an **actual example** of an early song collector making the mode-correcting mistake you describe? I can't think of one and I think you're fantasizing. (People trying to notate with microtonal accuracy, as you need for the music of India or the Islamic world, is a different matter).

Well, Jack, if I'm fantasizing, then so is Prof.David C. Fowler, a teacher I had at the University of Washington, author of A Literary History of the Popular Ballad and other books. And Cecil J. Sharp himself, who mentioned this several times in his writings. This is also mentioned in books by MacEdward Leach and Evelyn Kendrick Wells. I think those are fairly solid authorities.

As to examples, Dr. Fowler gave a couple in class, but that was some 50 years ago, and I don't recall the specifics. I do recall, however, that one was a particular version of "The Broken Token" ("Pretty Little Miss" or "John Riley"). One collector notated the song from a particular singer in a straight natural minor (A B C D E F G), and mentioned that the singer, "being untrained, of course, had an indifferent sense of musical pitch." Sharp collected the same song a short time later from the same singer, and in Sharp's notation, the scale was A B C D E F# G. The raised sixth (F# rather than F natural) is the defining characteristic of the Dorian mode.

Sharp found a number of such examples of folk songs being sung in modes and compared them with notations made by previous collectors in which the "wrong note" (or notes) had been "corrected," putting the song into a more conventional scale. Sharp stated that he was certain that these "wrong notes" were not wrong at all. He knew enough about modes to be able to recognize them when he encountered them.

Other than straight major and minor (which, incidentally are the Ionian and Aeolian modes, respectively), the two modes one encounters the most in Anglo-American folk music are the Dorian (like the natural minor or Aeolian mode, but with a raised sixth) and the Mixolydian (like the modern major scale—Ionian mode—but with a flatted seventh). If the song seems to want to end on the dominant chord, it's probably Mixolydian mode. One also encounters pentatonic scales.

And just to be abundantly clear, I'm talking about Anglo-American folk music, not the music of India or the Islamic world.

Don Firth