Right on, Mary!

Yeah, I've been wrestling with this one, too. And I've come to a conclusion.

When I first started singing folk songs, most of us learned the songs we knew from recordings, and there were not that many available. Mostly Burl Ives and Richard Dyer-Bennet, and a very few others. Gradually more records came out, we discovered various song collections like those of Carl Sandburg and the Lomaxes, and our repertoires expanded. But the first songs we learned were always the nucleus.

Then the Great Folk Scare came along and everybody got so bloody sophisticated. It began to happen more and more often that when someone sang something like Barbara Allen or Lord Randal or John Henry or any of a number of "standard" folk songs (usually songs as recorded by BI or RD-B or Josh White), there were those who would roll their eyes and moan, "Oh, NO! Not that again!" Generally it was not audience members, but other recently converted "folkies," those who considered the Kingston Trio and The Limeliters as "source singers," who pulled this stuff. But I guess self-appointed pompous-ass censorship is still going on.

My conclusion? I like all these old songs and I will sing them. I fact, I've often toyed with the idea of doing a concert composed entirely of songs that nobody sings anymore — songs that used to (and sometimes still do) make people roll their eyes and moan. The concert title or theme would be "Oh, no! Not that again!"

They are good songs. Some of them lasted for hundreds of years before we came along, and they deserve to keep on going. That's why I have decided to go ahead and sing them, despite the writhing of the super-sophisticates. I've been sort of out of it recently and not knowing that The Fields of Athenry had reached its "sell by" date, I learned it. I like it. I plan to sing it. And if this makes anybody gag, then they can just step outside until I'm through.

"Joan Baez did that twenty years ago? Interesting. I just did it now." Or. "That's not the way Ewan MacColl sings it? Well, that's the way I sing it."

If you like it, sing it! Unless you're singing to a bunch of self-inflated stuffed shirts, I think you'll get a pretty good response from any audience composed of real people.

Don Firth