Hello All

I agree about the Unthanks, but when they were on the folk proms, hardl anybody on Mudcat had a good word to say on them, and some comments focussed on their weight not their music.

Pardon is relevant as he is a 'case study' from a former time which is used as a basis for comparison with the current state of music.

I had looked at previous material on Pardon on Mudcat and considered starting a thread, as Pardon and the journalism and other literature etc framing him for public consumption seem to me to provide the basis for an interesting case study.

To me, this is an elderly single man, living in quite a large farmhouse who occupied some of his leisure time working out tunes on a melodion, and remembered a lot of what look to me like Victorian pop songs which he believed his maternal grandfather had learned from broadsides. He stated in an early interview that he did not regard his material as folk, folk being something they did at school. He got taken up by a group of enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, copyrighted, presented as coming from the lowest ag lab level despite the plain educational achievements of his family and their place on the electoral register at time when there was still a propertly qualification. He gets presented as an expert on 'the tradition', a 'source singer', a person able to identify what is folk and what his not, as if he is even an expert on what the tradition is, he is subjected to all sorts of third rate qualitative research which itself portrays how not to do it, he gets a booking agent (albeit the gigs were not always easy to obtain, and I am interested in the ideological framework within which all of this takes place. It isn't just that people put in opinions as if they were 'facts', stuff that doesn't fit the required image seems to get left out.

But I am sorry, and it was a good idea to open op a separate thread.
Jim Carroll winds himself up.