Sweeney O'Pibroch depends on a mysterious combination of two vices for the entirety of his arguments.

First there is a curious inverted snobbery that derides any attempt to understand what any folk art is, where it came from and what makes it (as it is) different.

But this bigotry and hatred of any study of a folk art as distinct from treating it as a form of entertainment like any other is hidden behind a sesquipedalian effulgence that strongly points to a determined attempt to abandon any connection with (and hence to abandon any understanding of) the groupings he pretends to admire and defend.

Once you dig into it, and wrestle the octopus of his verbiage to the ground, it boils down to assertion (indeed irrational assertion) driven by an assumed class hatred cloaked in obfuscation.

It cannot be doubted that there have been oral traditions. It cannot be doubted that many individuals have contributed, some by plan, some by mondegreen, to the shaping of songs and stories, as no doubt many have provided input to the forms now seen in folk plastic arts. There is no ground to assume that no previous performers users or carriers of the tradition understood them. Very likely, as today, and as in the rest of the spectrum, some understood and some did not. Indeed today there (surely) is no assumption that the individuals who remembered (and/or modified) the forms of the oral arts that they had heard did not, on a wholesale basis, understand them.

Sweeney builds an entire edifice (well, a mass of words, since there seems to be no coherent design with any planned outcome) on the insecure foundation of himself assuming that someone, somewhere, has been oppressed by an assumption that that person was stupid.





Having said that I should like to disagree with the apparent assumption that there are no chord sequences in traditional songs. Since rhythm or choice of metre is a voluntary aspect of the telling of any tale or expression of any words, in many cases all it requires ("requires" may be too strong a word - rhythm helps me to envisage the sequences, but others may find it not so) is the assumption of a rhythm for wonderful chord sequences to become implied. Consequently the "naked" form of traditional song becomes a matter of choice. One may do them that way, or one may put forceful chordal accompaniments with them.