publication does a doubtful service to folksongs

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 11 Dec 07 - 03:53 AM

'.....how much we are indebted to all these people who were driven by an evangelical belief.
Cap'n,
Neither MacColl nor Lloyd could be described as 'evangelical communists' as far as I remember them. Certainly both were on the left, but I can't remember them ever peddling a 'party line' - often it was quite difficult to spot Bert's politics - in fact, he was usually 'all things to all men'.
The early (present) revival owes its existence largely to the support it got from the left; The Worker's Music Association was the forerunner to Topic Records.
Singers like MacColl and Lloyd believed, as I do, that the songs we call 'folk' were made and transmitted by the 'lower' classes (for the want of a better word). The sea songs were obviously made by people who had a working knowledge of the lower decks, and the soldiers songs smack of lower-rank experience. Could anybody who hadn't experienced farm life have written the bothie ballads? I doubt it.
I firmly believe that the great body of our (anonymous) folk songs were the creation of the (largely agricultural) working classes.
There has been much activity in the past in trying to discover who wrote 'the ballads', pretty much without success so far, but for me they smack of vernacular speech, humour, experience and observation and are fairly obviously of common origin.
Even if they came from the pens and the heads of 'the educated classes' as has been occasionally claimed, it was the uneducated labourers, weavers, miners, Travellers who put them in circulation, adapted them, created many versions of them and made sure they didn't die off.
One thing I definitely got from working with MacColl was a pride in my own origins - there - I'll put my soap-box away now.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Dec 07 - 04:46 PM

Fangs for the memories!

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Rowan
Date: 10 Dec 07 - 04:33 PM

I was very pleased to have met many of the people mentioned in the broadcast and I have no doubt they influenced my own appreciation of how society worked and how it could be improved. And it wasn't just in Oz; Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Cecil Sharp were all tarred with a similar brush.

Back to the thread and the broadcast; they also influenced my participation in the folk scene both as a transmitter and interpreter. Some of you may be interested to know that Keith McKenry was the person, in the broadcast, who was compiling histories by trawling through ASIO's files. Before he retired he was an Assistant Commissioner in the Taxation Office but is well known in the Oz folk scene as a poet and a publisher; "Fanged Wombat Publications" is his baby.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Jon Bartlett
Date: 10 Dec 07 - 04:33 PM

Now if only we could get into our own MI5 and MI6 files...

Jon Bartlett

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Dec 07 - 02:05 PM

I liked the bit where the secret service spy file reported that the man had broken his false teeth...

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 10 Dec 07 - 01:18 PM

ThankyouRowan ,a fascinating programme.
One thing that struck me,the importance of these collectors, many of whom were communists according to ASIO,as were Lloyd and MacColl,and how much we are indebted to all these people who were driven by an evangelical belief.Dick Miles

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Dec 07 - 07:20 PM

Andrez, not Azizi - sorry.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Dec 07 - 06:24 PM

You don't have to wait for the repeat, Azizi - just click on the link Rowan gave and you can listen to it at your convenience.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Andrez
Date: 09 Dec 07 - 03:49 PM

I only came across this thread today and so missed sundays broadcast. I'll make sure I catch the repeat on Thursday and listen and reflect and learn. Thanks so much for publicising this program Rowan... and Radio National of course. I dips me lid to yez both!

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Dec 07 - 01:26 PM

Thanks for that pointer to the John Manifold programme, Rowan. I'm listening to it now.

It strikes me that some of us do make heavy weather about classifying and pigeonholing and drawing lines between different ways of doing that. All that's fun and can even be useful - but we shouldn't give them do much weight. As the saying goes, don't go taking the map for the territory.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: Stringsinger
Date: 09 Dec 07 - 01:19 PM

The future of folkmusic in the consciousness of the public relies upon the intersection of
the Venn diagrams. If tradition informs a small group of people who represent a culture that will eventually be replaced by another one more tuned to today, then this tradition has a comparitively short shelf life. If however, this tradition is taken up and responded to by in an outside culture, it may mutate and change but still be around years from now. If it is studied and respected the baby won't be thrown out with the bathwater.

The romantic view that somehow a Rousseauian approach to the return to primitive modes of learning as a viable means to preserve something seems misguided to me. Information comes from many different sources and why isolate how it is disseminated?

There are many folk "agendas" some coming from academia, some coming from active performers, and some who don't care too much about knowing about the songs but just enjoy them, all have a place and when these elements intersect, you have a vital folk culture. To try to separate these elements into convenient slices seems to be antithetical
to a vibrant living folk culture.

Frank Hamilton

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 09 Dec 07 - 12:35 PM

Jon-
I'd go along with the intersecting circles idea, but to my mind the first circle would consist of music played, sung and performed to members of your own cultural community, and the other music plyed, sung and performed for "outsiders". The fist circle is what I consider to be folk. And the area of intersection can become vanishingly small.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Jon Bartlett
Date: 09 Dec 07 - 03:54 AM

I'm just listening to the fascinating piece on Manifold on ABC.

I think that there are two traditions in "folk music". Think of a Venn diagram, of two circles, intersecting. The first circle, what might be called "the old tradition", contains a) the tradition itself - the oral transmission of song and story; b) the locus of this transmission (e.g. shearing shed, logging camp, the pub, army camp, rugby shower rooms, fo'c'sle); c) publications used by the this tradition (e.g. broadsides, occasionally notebooks, etc.); and d) the singers themselves.

The second circle is what might be called "the new tradition", which contains a) the tradition itself - the oral transmission of song and story; b) the locus of this transmission (folk club, folk festival, academic folklore departments and conferences); c) publications used by this tradition (books, CD/LP/DVD/MP3's/cassettes, radio/TV/internet, and schools); and d) the singers themselves.

These two circles overlap very little: in the area common to both are the singers of "the old tradition" (now called "tradition bearers" or the like) and the publications of "the old tradition".

Two points to consider:
1. These are two circles, and not one.
2. There are no moral connotations associated with either circle: neither circle is "right" or "wrong" (whatever these words might mean).

Manifold was a passionate, intelligent, motivated and tenacious intellectual and he admired the first circle very much: its intelligence, its community, its musical code. From what I have read by and about him, I gather that he hated what had sometimes happened to "the old tradition" – its transformation by some into middle-class piano-accompanied parlour music, its ossification and dissemination in ossified form by print, and its falling into the hands of professional performers.

Capt. Birdseye's original post, and the preceding and following paragraphs in the introduction to PBAFS, nicely display his awareness of the existence of thee two intersecting circles, and his dialectical recognition that they both helped and hindered each other. Helped: because the second circle needed the first as material, and the first needed the second as a preservative. Hindered: because the second's preservation of the first ossified a living tradition, and the first's "authority" limited the free creativity of the second.

I share many of his concerns. As a researcher, a former teacher and a historian, I have often thought that we'd learn better if we closed down all the schools, the folk tradition would be better if there were no books or recordings, and that we'd understand history better if we blew up all libraries and museums. "The tradition of all dead generations", a German philosopher once said, "weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living ..." I take Manifold to be expressing in the words of his already quoted just this dialectical awareness. I think that Capt. Birdseye did us all a service by opening this discussion.

Jon Bartlett

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: Stringsinger
Date: 08 Dec 07 - 04:12 PM

Sam Hinton, the folksong performer, scholar, Renaissance man and brilliant made an important observation. Barbara Allen would be lost in the folk tradition had it not been set
in print and subsequently revived. The whole notion of what constitutes a folk singer in America came from the literary man who used it to describe what he did in concert, Carl Sandburgh. John Lomax would find it uphill sledding to get his cowboy ballads out in print and as a result, there is an interest in this kind of occupational song that gives rise to the annual meeting of cowboy poets.

The folklorists and academicians serve an important function in the appreciation of folk music. The stuff pouring out of pubs and bars can be said to be kind of a mish-mosh. I do agree that folk music is best communicated on a personal level, people-to-people rather than frozen accounts in books.

Bartok and Schubert recognized that folk music was unique and studied it academically.
Also Villalobos and the composer Chavez from Mexico. Stravinsky too.

Publication amplifies but by no means substitutes for a personal experience of folk music.
What does a doubtful service is to isolate any information coming from any source as being valueless.

Frank Hamilton

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 08 Dec 07 - 01:34 PM

Cap'n,
Have done so - think I got it right,
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Newport Boy
Date: 08 Dec 07 - 06:55 AM

Dick Greenhaus posted:

'In pre-publication days, I'd guess that most folks who sang knew, maybe, a dozen or so songs. How many do you know?'

I'm not sure I agree with you, Dick. If you're saying that, in pre-publication days, singers didn't learn more than a dozen songs, I don't think that's true. When James "Brasser" Copper wrote down all the family songs that he knew, there were many more than a few dozen.

Some singers only learn a few songs, others have a large number. I don't think the form of the original matters - if you want to learn a song, you learn it.

I think you're on stronger ground if you say that most singers don't sing more than a dozen songs. I know many songs which I sing to myself, but I can't do them justice in performance.

In my active days singing and running a folk club (1970s), I wrote a repertoire list. These were only the songs that I could stand up and sing without notebook or rehearsal. The list ran to over 200 songs. The majority had been learned from records or books, but there were 20 or so from family and other singers.

Wherever the songs came from, I usually wrote the words down to learn them. I still have some of the postcards and scraps of paper that I carried around for the few days it took to commit them to memory.

I really don't sing in public now, but I think I probably still have half that list in memory. Plus at least 30 male voice choir pieces and most of the male solos from the Gilbert & Sullivan operas. My party piece (which I was not often allowed to perform) was a solo rendition of the whole of 'Trial by Jury'.

Phil

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 08 Dec 07 - 06:38 AM

I agree with you JC,.
could you email me sometime about a different matter,so I can contact you.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 08 Dec 07 - 06:06 AM

Cap'n,
The idea that there is a 'right and wrong' person to receive information - of any kind - is disturbing, to say the least.
Who is to be the judge - you - me George Bush; come on Cap'n, you can do better than raise a silly statement made forty five years ago.
This smacks of the mysterious 'big league' which first came to light in a Musical Traditions review some years ago, presumably a self-appointed elite who decides what is good-bad or right-wrong on behalf of the rest of us.
As far as print is concerned, I have never met a source singer who was not influenced in one way or another by print. The Irish song repertoire would be very much impoverished without the existence of the garlands and song books that could be bought at the fairs and markets up to the first half of the 20th century, or the ballad sheets that were sold on the streets and in the pubs, or even the still ongoing song page in Ireland's Own.
Putting songs in a book does preserve them, but not like stuffed animals.
The future of published songs lays entirely in the hands of the people who get hold of the books.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Rowan
Date: 08 Dec 07 - 01:18 AM

Relax, Dick. I'm not having a go at you but trying to help interested parties follow the ins and outs of a discussion.

CHeers, Rowan

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: M.Ted
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 10:49 PM

I think that folk music belongs to whoever wants it, regardless as to what anyone else happens to think about it. You can collect, record, notate, and transcribe songs, but you can't make people like them. You can sing them, or not, and others will sing them, or not. Oh, yes, you can publish them, too. And people will either read the book, or...well, you know.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 10:19 PM

In pre-publication days, I'd guess that most folks who sang knew, maybe, a dozen or so songs. How many do you know?

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: Art Thieme
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 09:04 PM

To all,

Yes, and no.

Art

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 08:25 PM

Rowan ,as I think you understand, I was not trying to rubbish Manifold,but trying to Stimulate discussion.
anyone that has a copy of the Penguin Book of Australian Folksongs,and reads Manifolds introduction can judge for themselves.
here is his next paragraph.
[Isometimes wish,in vain,that we could keep up the strict etiquette that was observed by the real bush singers.A young man used to learn his songs from the acknowledged singer of the district,and might eventually earn permission to sing them to the limited public of the bush,wherever or wherever the acknowledged singer was not present.Some few songs were common property;others,songs from books,were rather contemptuously exempted fromthe rule;but in the main this apprenticeship system prevailed at least among men.When the public performer of a treason song might earn a stretch in jail,it was apoint of honour to perform it properly.]
I strongly disagree with Manifold about folksong not belonging in the school room,furthermore publication does not preserve them like,stuffed animals in a museum.Publication of traditional songs and tunes enables them to be circulated further,it is then up to the reader, to realise that both the tune and the story is open to alteration.
we must also realise that when songs /tunes were passed on only by oral means,some of the alterations were not just accidents or misheard mistakes,but were deliberate improvements.Dick Miles














;

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Rowan
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 07:49 PM

I posted the advert for the ABC (Oz) program in this thread because it was the only one that I saw as"relevant", in that the program (which I haven't yet heard) might give those on this thread an opportunity to hear what someone else says about Manifold.

From memory, the part of Dick's 7 December post that appears between square brackets (under the date of 9 July) is a quote of Malcolm Douglas' posted on 10 July, with the rest of what Manifold wrote hotlinked to some of the rest of Manifold's published 1962 Introduction to the Penguin Book of Australian Folk Songs.

Following the discussion of Dick's proposition properly will require some recursiveness or reading the thread right through; the later would be easier. But I await the broadcast with some interest.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 01:15 PM

Subject: publication does a doubtful service to
From: Captain Birdseye - PM
Date: 09 Jul 07 - 01:33 PM

Publication does a doubtful service to folk songs .it preservesthem;
but it preserves them dead,like stuffed animals in a museum.It brings them to awide audience;but this includes so many of thewrong people,from school teachers,to hill billy addicts.The wrong people are those who are bent on taking folksong out of its natural surroundings.Folksongs belong in the home,in the pub,in the focsle,in the back of a truck or a friendly verandah;not in the list of set peices at an Eisteddfod,not in the schoolroom unless as a rare
treat,not between toothpaste advertisements on radio or television.In the alien atmosphereof the concert hall it takes agreat artist to preserve the life and spirit even of his own folksongs let alone those of other people.
J. S.Manifold,Queensland 1962[compiler of Penguin Australian folk songs]
I have now corrected the punctuation and idiosyncratic spelling mistakes that so upset a couple of Earlier contributors[Folkie Dave.
[It was also selective and incomplete, and therefore seriously misleading; it misrepresented Manifold in a quite inexcusable fashion. Whether this was deliberate or the result of incompetence is hard to tell.

Rowan has provided the proper context, so I'd suggest that anyone wishing to make informed comment reads Dick's barely legible original post in the light of the rest of what Manifold wrote.]

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: GUEST,TJ in San Diego
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 11:19 AM

These days, if we had to rely strictly on the "oral tradition" to promulgate folk songs, the cupboard would be a bit bare, I reckon. Like many others, I have "adopted" a fair number of songs from other performers and from records. But, were it not for library sources, numerous books, pamphlets and the like, I know I would have a far slimmer repertoire, and I would be the poorer for it.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: GUEST
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 05:02 AM

Why not in the school room? What is awful about that?

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: theleveller
Date: 07 Dec 07 - 03:36 AM

Just seen this thread for the first time. Last week I got the s**t kicked out of me on the BBC board for suggesting soemthing similar - that folk music is, essentially, the music of the people and not an art form for professional performers. (Runs away and hides under table awaiting another flood of abuse).

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Rowan
Date: 06 Dec 07 - 11:04 PM

From the Ausfolk list:
Hindsight, ABC Radio National

On Sunday December 9th, 2pm, repeated on Thursday, December 13th, 1pm, there will be a broadcast of a radio program (duly available for the following four weeks online at the link), where Tom Morton explores a forgotten chapter in Australia's musical history -- through the life of a man who worked to rescue it from oblivion.

John Manifold was a collector of Australian folksongs, a musician, and an internationally acclaimed poet.

Manifold was one of the pioneering figures in the Australian folk revival of the 1950s -- a movement which believed folksongs carried within them an alternative, subversive version of our history.

In many ways he was an unlikely champion of the people's music -- born into a family of wealthy pastoralists in Victoria, he went to Cambridge, became a communist and worked for British intelligence in WW2 -- and was kept under surveillance by ASIO in the 50s.

And as we'll hear, he not only collected songs, he also shaped and in some cases constructed them.

Hindsight, ABC Radio National,
Sunday December 9th, 2pm, repeated Thursday, December 13th, 1pm
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 Jul 07 - 08:43 PM

Frank Hamilton,I agree with you,earlier today I was listening to a recording of Lady Diamond[The vinyl lp was for sale on folk yourself],with Martin Carthy playing guitar and I had forgotten that I had written a new tune for the ballad.
like Manifold I regard the music as a SKELETON, I know Iam not alone in Thinking like this,Andy Irvine put a new tune to Willy of the Winsbury,that has entered the folk tradition.,but of course without Childs published words,he could not have done so.
Finally might I say, how much I like the Penguin book of australian folksongs.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 13 Jul 07 - 11:50 AM

The Carpenter website is the result of the initial indexing project only.

Preparing the materials themselves for publication is obviously a very large task requiring funding of the sort not usually available to the folk arts in Britain; the physical collection, however, belongs to the Library of Congress, and American funding allows the project to continue. The aim is eventually to make the raw materials available in digitised form via the web (the initial digitisation is already completed), and to publish a full print edition with the appropriate scholarly apparatus.

This is liable to take some time, though we must hope not as long as Greig-Duncan, which took about twenty years to complete. I don't know what stage the team has reached, but I do know that the work continues.

The recordings Peter Kennedy was selling copies of are sometimes reproduced at the wrong speed (the late Bruce Olson went into technical details at some point; I forget whether here or on the BALLAD-L list) and there may be a question as to their legality. Probably the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, as the owners of the original recordings, would be able to advise.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: GUEST,Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Jul 07 - 02:08 AM

Dave,
I think the eventual aim of the team working on Carpenter was (or should be) to get the collection in a state for publication.
If this is the case, it will, in my opinion, be one of the most important collections ever made generally available.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 Jul 07 - 12:01 AM

to stop any more time wasting, nar narnar childish stuff from FolkieDave, Eisteddfod instead of eisteffod,well if that isnt nitpicking.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: Stringsinger
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 09:08 PM

The best way to learn a song is aurally from a person who knows the history in person. How many of us really have that opportunity? If I could sit at the feet of Big Bill Broonzy, Jean Ritchie or Buell Kazee and learn the song first hand I would be happy.

So...we go to recordings and books. Publication preserves some songs as in the case of Barbara Allen which was forgotten for many years until it reached print. Many a "Broadside" ballad was scribbled out on a piece of paper and learned that way.

The doubtful service is when people become "paper trained". They don't have the courage to deviate from the "score" and do their own version. I have no problem changing lyrics when I think I can improve on them and that goes for all the written and anonymous songs that I know. The best songwriters don't need any changes. I won't get into that mess o' beans.

I think one of the doubtful services is trying to imitate and be something you're not.
Style is one thing but making your voice crack or squeak because you think it sounds authentic is phony.

Learn 'em anyway you can is my tune.

Frank Hamilton

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 08:58 PM

Dave Eyre, idiosyncratic spelling,[untrue].
punctuation, commas instead of semicolons, does not in this case alter the meaning.,
the post seemed to be understood by everyone else.
The omission of that which followed my original post,was no more important than the omission of the two paragraphs before it.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Folkiedave
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 07:42 PM

No cultural filters I am aware of......

Dave

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: Rowan
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 07:01 PM

My pleasure, Patty.

Dick, I didn't interpret anything that Malcolm or Dave wrote as other than civilised but perhaps there are cultural filters at work that us southerners don't immediately perceive.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: pattyClink
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 04:24 PM

Thanks Rowan for the hash answer!

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Folkiedave
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 03:16 PM

Jim,

The website seems to indicate the work is finished now.

Julia no longer works at Sheffield and hasn't done so for some time. She is at the Elphinstone Institute in Aberdeen.

Sorry Peter Kennedy treated your tapes in such a cavalier fashion.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: GUEST,Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 03:04 PM

Dick/Dave
The Carpenter Collection is a massive manuscript collection of songs and stories collected in the US and the UK (mainly ballads from Scotland). It includes 20 odd 7" reel-to-reel tapes of the singers (often a couple of verses only of each song).
It is at present being worked on by Julia Bishop and others (Sheffield).
As I explained, Kennedy reviewed it for the Folk Song Journal and promptly put the tapes he had been sent (by me) up for sale in his catalogue.
That was how he got the ones that are presumably now for sale on Dick's catalogue.
Judge for yourself.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 10:47 AM

Ijust wanted to discuss it because it was interesting.Rowan you put your points,in an acceptable and civilised manner,Ihave no problem with that.
However the attacks from Malcolm Douglas and Folkie dave were something else,and added nothing to the debate,that hadnt already been said.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: Rowan
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 10:18 PM

Hash House Harriers may differ from the definition following but generally they are groups of people (originally blokes) who get together regularly for a cross country run followed by conviviality and libations. Originally it was an expat British thing but there are outbreaks all over the place.

Now, back to Dick's interpretation of Manifold and his suggestion I was being selective. Given the size of the text I regarded my summarization of the main body preceding Dick's 'quote' as an adequate saving of space while conveying the message. DIck is correct about the Lawson and Paterson texts entering the tradition and I was surprised to hear an example come back to me (a Lawson text which was published in 1891 and collected more than half a century later from someone who'd heard it sung in 1893 in the backblocks of west Qld; I cobbled a modification, sang it in the Singer's Club in 1977 and heard my effort from a bloke who introduced it as an Irish version. C'est la vie.)

While Manifold's words were replicated in Dick's post I thought his idisyncratic expression did a disservice to both Manifold's argument and Dick's proposition so I thought it best to put both into the context that would allow Manifold's argument to be properly understood and thus properly debated. It's the academic training, I know.

I suspect (but don't "know") that what was really getting up Manifold's nose when he wrote the words that Dick presented was the steady gentrification of music that certainly was not (in his view and despite contributions from both Paterson and Lawson) music of the "working class", hence the disparaging of teachers and Eisteddfods in the one breath.

So it's with some irony that most of the current population that owns his books, sings the songs and argues about their attributes (real or imagined) is much more gentrified and "middle class" than the milieu Manifold preserved. Australian shearers these days don't sing these songs and neither do Australian miners, unless they're performing in a bush band. And I think I've exemplified the gentrification of the Oz folk scene elsewhere on Mudcat.

I think the point Dick might have been trying to elevate for debate is worth discussing but he could have done it without (what in Oz politics is known as) the 'dog whistle'.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 05:51 PM

The Carpenter Collection I referred to consisted of the recordings of Sea Music that Carpenter made in England. I know not how Kennedy got it, but it's the only source I've been able to find that's in print.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Folkiedave
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 05:39 PM

For a short period of time I was selling some of his books on commission. (As I made clear at the time).

That was instead of them going to local bookdealers who would have given his ill wife and his son
next to nothing for some very valuable books.

I knew nothing of the man having hardly met him.

I wish everyone had treated singers better - including me.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: pattyClink
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 04:05 PM

PoppaGator (or other answerer)what the heck are "hash-house-harrier runners"?

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 03:42 PM

FOLKIE DAVE, were you not selling books from his estate?.
Ihave been called an apologist for PeterKennedy,I appreciate his collecting, but having listened to Jim Carroll and Fred Mcormick,I wish he had treated his source singers better.
I wouldnt have touched his estate with a barge pole.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: Folkiedave
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 03:12 PM

Jim I'm not in the business of defending Peter Kennedy - I do not know enough to make a judgement.

But the Carpenter Collection as I understand it, is huge, so it cannot be the one at the American Folklife Centre or Sheffield University.

This is what I understand by the Carpenter Collection.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folkson
From: GUEST
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 02:49 PM

Dick Greenhaus,
Don't really want to have another go at Peter Kennedy but I wonder why he had the Carpenter Collection in his catalogue!
I know that I was asked to send him a set of the recordings for him to review for the Folk Song Journal - which I did. They shortly afterwards appeared for sale on Folktrax and there was a degree of disquiet about it at the time.
Was this sorted out at the time or is this just another case of letting sleeping dogs lie.
Best,
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: GUEST, Mikefule
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 02:45 PM

The problem isn't so much the writing of the songs as the fact that some people attach exaggerated importance to the written version. I was once criticised in this forum for not quoting the "official version" of a well known song - I had written the words from memory.

A good singer uses the words like a good cook uses a recipe. A bad singer uses the words like a chemist uses a formula.

One of my best friends, a fine singer, always has the words open in front of him when he sings, in case he forgets. He seldom forgets, but he very seldom sings the actual words on the page in front of him either.

Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
From: The Sandman
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 12:51 PM

Folkie Dave,take melodeon boys advice.
Manifolds point[asIunderstand it] is the text is only a skeleton,and that with modern technology[the computer perhaps]theycan be circulated far quicker and over a wider area,than when they were passed on orally as in Patersons time.
However he contradicts himself IMO by stating that they only belong in certain places,and shouldnt be sung by schoolteachers or hillbilly addicts[hillbilly music is folk music ClarenceAshley Roscoe Holcomb,Jean Ritchie.
HE SAYS.the wrong people are those who are bent on taking it out of its natural surroundings.
So on the one hand he says he hopes the songs will leave the page and pass into oral circulation over a wider stretch of country than the old method could cover,.but then he says only certain people can sing them,and then only in their natural surroundings[whatever that is][does that mean only miners can sing mining songs]that means Ewan Maccoll shouldnt sing Springhill disaster.
the last line is pure boloney,people will sing the songs wherever they like, regardless of their occupation,because they are the songs of the folk or people.
If you dont want certain people to sing the songs you shouldnt publish them in a book.