A "shipload" of songs, eh, Little Hawk? Must be the Titanic...

I'm fairly new to the Mudcat, and a lot of what brought me here is songs I learned as a kid, or from kids, and it continually astonishes me how many of the songs that I thought were "traditional" songs are actually quite clear in their authorship. "Some Folks Do" by Stephen Foster, for example, is a song that I learned very young, with no idea that it wasn't a folksong.

Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and even folks like Tom Lehrer popularized songs, traditional or not, that our counselors liked and taught us at camp as folksongs. Authorship just wasn't the question if the song was good enough to sing. And the best songs to sing became songs we taught our friends on the playgrounds and so on. I was talking about folk tales and folk songs to a fifth grade class last spring, and when I asked if they knew any folk songs the first one they named was "Puff the Magic Dragon." And the teacher thought it was a folksong too! I disabused them of the notion, gently, and asked for another song, and three little girls in the back, much shyer now, finally volunteered to sing one for us. They sang "Disco Duck"...

Folklore will survive, but we can't see from here what will be chosen. We can only see what we have to chose from now.