In the process of putting together Anglo, English and now Duet(Concertina) Internationals I have listened to hours upon hours of archive cassette recordings and sadly a very small percentage is usable.

Given that Alan is trying to produce a CD that is marketable to a modern generation I can sympathise with him but there are other valuable functions of recordings that have the occasional bum note, dog bark or police siren in among the music.

In the mid 70s the most frequent (and reliably scheduled) bush dances in SE Oz were the Monaro Folk Music Society's monthly dances in Canberra's Yarralumla Woolshed; woolshed dances feature prominently in SE Oz social traditions. After the dance it was usual for singers and musos to repair to someone's place for a session into the small hours. Seeral of these were held at Mike Jackson's place in Higgins and Tony Suttor brought his 5" Sony R-R recorder along to at least two of these and taped quite a lot of music. While the materials were good the setup was rather basic so, while the music was clear, the quality wasn't really acceptable on a commercial basis.

These subsequently appeared, and were passed from person to person, as cassettes colloquially known as "The Higgins Tapes" (they were still surfacing more than a decade later) with the advice, "If you learn these tunes, you'll be able to join 60% of tunes at almost any folk session in the country." They were almost all dance tunes and formed the basis of many brackets played by bush dance bands all over Oz. They also featured prominently in Talunga Music's "Begged, Borrowed and Stolen", a published (and still available) collection of sheet music for tunes that have the same function.

Almost every player on the original tapes (me included) has had a fine career in the (mainly) Oz folk music scene but none, to my knowledge, has ever sought payment or even acknowledgement; nobody made any money out of the production or distribution of the tapes and everybody regarded their distribution as a way of getting people playing. Even now, I can wander into the Session Bar at the National and recognise some brackets as having had their origin on those tapes so their quality didn't appear to hamper their function one little bit.

But, as I commented above, some cultural contexts encourage this while others encourage other aspects. I recently saw a couple of animated cartoons that some Mudcatters might recognise; "Creature Comforts" uses 'vox pops on many topics and puts people's voices with clay animations. The series recorded in the UK (which I suspect is the original) credits "The voices of the great British public" while the series recorded in the US lists the names of all the people whose voice was used.

Horses for courses. All power to your elbow, Bob.

Cheers, Rowan