I must admit (at the risk of being stoned in the streets) that Bob Dylan is not, and never has been, my cup of tea. I found him grating right from the start, and it was a bit later that I began to understand the reasons for my immediate and visceral negative reaction to him.

It seems that when he was in high school, he was singing rock and roll (nothing wrong with that) and that he had a fairly nice singing voice, not unlike Buddy Holly's. The word is that some of his school friends were more than a little appalled when they heard his first folk records. What had he done to his singing voice!??

I believe it was in Positively 4th Street that David Hajdu described the "transition" that Dylan went through once he reached Greenwich Village.

What he was doing was suppressing his natural voice, singing through his nose, wandering off-pitch (which he hadn't been doing before), and generally trying to sound like he was ninety years old and toothless. This, apparently, was his idea of how folk songs should be sung!

Well—there are a lot of people out there who seem to feel that if you want to be a folk singer, you should not try to sing well—or that you should try not to sing well. This shows a level of contempt for one's audiences and it demeans both the songs themselves and the source singers who sang them, some of whom are very good singers by almost any standard.

If a song is worth singing, whether it is a folk song, a pop song, or an art song, it is worth trying to sing it to the best of your ability. I don't mean that you should try to make a folk song sound like Schubert lieder; one should stay within the stylistic framework of any genre of songs. But intentionally singing badly is not an inherent characteristic of folk music, and to do so intentionally is both phony and degrading to the whole genre.

My apologies to Bob Dylan enthusiasts, but them's my sediments.

As far as protest songs are concerned, heck, I sing a few of them myself. But a little bit goes a long way. I really hate it when I pay good money to hear someone sing and they spend the whole evening trying to propagandize me from the stage, "lecturing" the audience with their choice of songs. Part of it may be that so many singers of protest songs seem so damned self-righteous.

Don Firth