" As I see it, following this thread, you have come to the book with a closed mind and it has challenged your preconceived ideas and you don't like it. "
I came to the boor with a great deal of pleasant anticipation - it fell very short of what I anticipated
It challenges almost everything that has gone before, that is it's main failing - by redefining folk by including pop songs of the past, it makes what was a handleable subject into one so vast that it would be unapproachable
It removes the uniqueness of the genre and it doesn't touch their social or historical significance as a 'worms eye view' of humanity and social history.
If there are 'preconceptions' in what I have argued, they are no mine - they are those that have existed since the topic first came to public attention
Why do you people insist onn making this discussion a personal attack - are the arguments I have pur forward so profound or so offensive that nobody actually wants to discuss them
Is the idea that working people could have made their folk songs so outlandish?
The points these "two people" have argued out here are fundamental ones and need to be established before we can begin to understand folk song
It's very difficult to discuss them elsewhere on this forum as 'What if folksong' has been made a no-go area
Rud raises that question in the beginning of that book and it continues to the end
If we can't discuss it here, where the hell else are we going to discuss it
I agree with Carthy's point too - what a shame Roud didn't include a discography or full texts of songs so we could see and listen to the "Folk Songs of England" the author was talking about?
You say you find the book interesting and agree with the "main thrust of his argment convincing"
Good for you - I found the bbok interesting and find the main thrust of the argument totally unconvincing, and that is exactly what I have been trying to discuss.
Why don't you stop making personal attacks and do exactly that?
All such attacks achieve as far as I am concerned is to persuade me that I might just have a point
Jim Carroll