"Of course music hall, pop songs and modern amplified non narrative music are all literally part of the people's culture."
Folk songs have always been regarded as those made, remade and adapted and passed on from community to community
Our oral traditions died with the advent of manufactured entertainment, the radio and eventually television - we became recipients of our culture rather than participants in it
Spend any time in a community that still has emnents of a folk tradition and you will find that the people who were around when it was active regarded the songs and tunes as "ours" - Norfolk, West of Ireland, Travellers
Walter Pardon, the last of the large repertoire singers, recorded hours for us, carefully explaining the difference between hisw "old folk songs" and "the modern stuff" (early twentieth century pop and Victorian Parlour Ballads mainly)
Mary Delaney, a blind Travelling woman with a large repertoire of traditional songs and ballads, also had a repertoire of Country and Western songs which she refused to sing to us "they're not Travellers songs" she told us
Tom Lenihan, West Clare small farmer, went on at length explaining not only what the "old traditional stuff" was but how he felt it needed to be sung
The greatest myth in folk song research is the claim that traditional singers didn't think about their songs and didn't discriminate between the traditional songs and anything else they might have picked up
The sad fact is that too many researchers were more interested in the songs as artifacts that they were of how the songs fitted into people's lives - they collected the songs without the information that came with them and assumed there was none to be got
If everything is folk song then there is no need to discriminate between the songs people sing - we may as well give 'The Birdie song' or Abba's 'Waterloo' Roud numbers - that's what 'the folk' are singing nowadays
Sorry - no cigar
Jim Carroll