Brian Peters wrote The excellent discussion in the New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs of folk song in a social context makes the point that singing for diversion and entertainment was once very widespread in the population.

In 1984 I was an heir in my great aunt's estate in a the house the family moved into in 1911. The attic was like peeling back history, with the cabinet radio in front of the box of lacquer records and then the big old Victrola, all of this in front of the music stand for the piano sheet music at the back wall of the upstairs room. A brief history of how this family entertained themselves with the earliest step being singing together at the piano with sheet music.

The Ur folksongs will never be discovered since they can't leave a fossil record, but (I imagine) an important part of the research includes an anthropological examination of the collections and early written records, wherever they are found, trying to find reference to known songs or better yet, the jotted down ancient lyrics. Am I correct? I'm an English major, who spent a portion of my academic pursuits focused on American Indian literature and the early records of literate Indians, of first settlers, and the largest portion coming from anthropologists who are very important in teasing out the earliest known tellings of stories and the understanding of remnants and fragments of earlier times. We look at anthropological transcriptions and translations of conversations looking for things that we understand now that they missed in their day.

If we didn't have a written record today this discussion of popular song versus traditional would all be moot. This whole discussion is putting modern composition and the written evidence against spoken and sung history and versions that were handed down through memory. If all of the old versions haven't been collected before now time is almost up because the written word trumps so much.

Allow me a moment to put on my academic hat and introduce some French theory. Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1984 (as La Condition pestmoderne: rapport sur le savoir). Chapter 6 (pgs 18 - 23) is "The Pragmatics of Narrative Knowledge" and has to do with passing down stories through the oral tradition. He discusses the transmission of narratives (obviously songs are a form of narrative) and that

their narration usually obeys rules that define the pragmatics of their transmission. I do not mean to say that a given society institutionally assigns the role of narrator to certain categories on the basis of age, sex, or family or professional group. What I am getting at is the pragmatics of popular narratives that is, so to speak, intrinsic to them. [20]

He gives the example of how a tribal Cashinahua storyteller always begins a story with their equivalent of "once upon a time." He would begin "Here is the story of ------, as I've always heard it told." Because he heard the story, because he tells the story, because he follows the social conventions to ground the story in its place in the culture, the community privileges the storyteller to do this work of transmitting cultural knowledge.

"The narrator's only claim to competence for telling the story is the face that he has heard it himself. The current narratee gains potential access to the same authority simply by listening." This is identical to the authority we grant to folksingers known for collecting and performing traditional songs.

Lyotard follows by noting that this "gives insight into what is a generally recognized property of traditional knowledge." Privileging the narrator is what cultures are inclined to do, but in modern times those narrators are up against the written and recorded word and allows quibbles with authorship, exact wording, sources, and versions. (I won't stray into Barthes and Foucault and argue about the Death of the Author, but a huge aspect of "folk" is that the author is unknown, which is mostly impossible with modern recorded and printed songs.) Before the prominence of the written word, cultures granted the storyteller the authority to do his or her work. When Child and Sharp and others started collecting them, things changed.

As I read this thread, am I correct in thinking that some participants in this discussion seem to want the continuum to move along as if modern composition is subject to the same eventual obscurity as songs composed hundreds of years ago, and that they will eventually be transmitted as a piece but missing the author bit of information? Do any of us really think that Johnny B. Goode will someday be an anonymous folk song? The traditional narrator storyteller/singer gives what they know about what they are about to perform and they tell the story or sing the song. In older times, as what was understood about the world changed, aspects of the song or story would change. The folk process. When modern songs are written on paper with names attached and copyright issued this process is no longer going to happen. Don't you think?

That's all I'll pull from the Lyotard essay, I need to re-read it to discuss any more in depth, but that isn't necessary for this topic. I just wanted to bring in something else for you to chew on.

SRS

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984. Translation from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. U of Minnesota Pr, Minneapolis.