The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #146595   Message #3396477
Posted By: GUEST,Blandiver
28-Aug-12 - 11:54 AM
Thread Name: Can a pop song become traditional?
Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
You don't do that; you criticise people for trying; you slag people of for what you think they are because they bother to make an effort, and you offer nothing in return

Not true, I'm simply accounting for a condition as I've understood it these past 40 years. It's just the way it is - simples. I'm not criticising any one individual, just pointing out what seems wonky to my sensitivities that's all.

If researchers got it wrong, tell them what they should have done to get it right.

This a weird one because in an ideal world there would have been no researchers and the old culture would have died away with dignity as the new replaced it. Maybe in an ideal world you wouldn't have had the schisms of social class that gave rise such a cultural apartheid in the first place, much less one that ultimately destroyed the human & natural ecology of the British Countryside in so spectacular a fashion, creating the sort of post-war housing estate ghettoes in which many of us were brought up and which have their modern counterpart in Blairite Blandness that blights greenfields at every turn. Maybe there would have been no need for The Revival because things would have kept going, ever evolving as they had been for centuries. Whatever the case, there's no way The Revival could have happened without the entrenched social-caste system we have in the UK & that I got pulled into at an early age. 40 years on it is very much a part of what I am, but I'm under no illusions as to its nature - nor yet to its value as a means of experiencing & creating Truly Great Music, be it Traditional or Revival. I listen in tears to Joseph Taylor singing Brigg Fair in Percy Grainger's 1903 wax cylinder recording - that's how real this music is for me.

*

Whilst I'm on here's a recording I made of Ross Campbell singing his setting of Rob Baxter's Braiding accompanying himself on anglo - a vignette of life in a fishing town in the 1960s. It's not Traditional, but it's idiomatically Folk and the very pip besides.

Braiding - Ross Campbell