Calum Johnston
". . .Oh well, you hear songs sung in many different ways. You some¬times feel that the people who are singing them have so feeling.. .
They know the song and they just rattle through it, as you might say. Then you hear others who really show that, they feel what they're singing. . . Oh yes, I always have to give as the words require. Some times a note may be short or a note may be long, according to the word that's used there, and very often there are hardly two verses sung in exactly the same way, on account of the words, because the syllables are different. . . Oh. . . . the old fellows, well some of them you see, some of them. had the art of putting a taste on a tune. . . well, what I would call putting a bias on it, putting a taste on it. You know it's just like eating something that has no taste, and then you put something on it to put a taste on it. . . Some would sing an air straight through the bare notes as you might say, and the others would put little grace notes in. that made all the difference, that gave a taste to that air, instead of having it bare. They clothed it up in beautiful garments as you might say.        ._
... I sing [the big songs] to myself because I know that people now¬adays. very few. ..like the old big songs, but say fifty or sixty years ago, there were plenty of people who did enjoy that type of song and they would prefer it to anything else that you sang. Nowadays they're much lighter in their choice. You see it's- this "diddles" that they like... It's just the way things have gone. The present generation they seem to have lost taste for all these things. The old stories have gone. Nobody has any interest in tales nowadays, and the old songs have gone, because nobody has any interest in them. They're too difficult for them to learn and they don't like them in any case. And it's a new generation, as you might say, that has grown, and you can't do anything to stop it. Even the language is suffering. It's deterior¬ating because they've lost their taste for good speech. Now the old one is we're very particular in their speech, and they took pride in proper speaking, proper talking, and although very few of them had any education seventy or eighty years ago. . . their language was pure at that time, and they spoke quite grammatically. Now if you try to correct them in any of their grammar they just laugh at you. . ."
SA 1967/41/2 Recorded from Calum Johnston by Thorkild Knudsen. lr. 1967.