A question springs into my mind about all this.
How do singers feel about their songs while they are singing them?
The most common experience we got from the field-singers we interviewed was that they saw them; "It's like sitting in the cinema", one singer told us.
Walter Pardon set the songs in his local area and he could provide us with descriptions of all the characters in the songs. We have an amusing recording of him describing what he 'looks at' when he's singing; "Down my nose....."
Irish singer Tom Lenihan the same - and the Travellers.
I know this to be the case with other singers. In the U.S. The Rounder CD of Mrs Texas Gladden has a track where she describes in some detail the step-by-step progress of Mary Hamilton to her execution.
In a number of cases where we've discussed this with singers they have said that they deliberately close their eyes to achieve this effect.
When I was singing regularly it was something I strove for - it didn't always happen, but when it did it stayed with you for a long time. Part of the preparation for singing the song was to create pictures of the songs in your minds-eye.
I am getting the impression here of people who consider it the pinnacle of achievement to arrive at the end of the song without dropping the ball. This surely means that singers are not experiencing their songs; it sounds more like a technical exercise of getting from A to Z rather than an act of enjoyment.
I really don't believe that failing memory is an excuse unless dementia has begun to set in.
Tom Lenihan was not noted by people who knew him as having a great memory - good, but not phenomenal. Yet, when into his eighties, we've recorded him singing a song which he had not thought about for forty years, without a single slip.
On Friday we went to the 100th birthday calebration organised for one of the singers we recorded some years ago. When we left she was still singing, and the love she had for her songs shone through her years.
I asked earlier, can people enjoy and experience their songs while reading them or worrying about remembering them. I never received a reply, so I took the answer to be no - that it was enjoyment enough to get through them; that's the impression I am left with anyway.
Jim Carroll