Joe and Big Mick flatter me beyond belief. I don't know a fraction of what, say, Joe Hickerson knows, or Bruce Olson (especially in reference to the Broadside ballads). Our Mudcat Irish scholars make most of us look like uninformed dunces. I've read a lot of books about folk music, and I've collected a number of songs and ballads in the field, but I am not truly a scholar. I've observed that autodidacts are often pretty well informed on the subject of their primary interest, but woefully uninformed in others. That's me, for sure.

I was just writing the note for Frank Proffitt's recording of "Tom Dooley" which is included on the CD we are about to release of his first Folk-Legacy recording. I had actually forgotten about the fanciful tale Lomax wrote concerning the "Yankee schoolteacher Grayson" in his introduction to the song in Folksong USA. Reading of the case in the Frank Brown collection, which includes extensive newspaper accounts relating to the murder of Laura Foster, the capture of Tom, the trial and the execution, I realized that the Lomax story was pure folklore. BUT (and this is important, I think) he may have misinformed us regarding the facts of the case, but he may have given us a way of thinking about the song that could enlighten our interpretation of it. The academic side of me finds it necessary to burst the romantic bubble, darn it, but the folklore in the Lomax tale is still kinda fun. D. K. Wilgus would have called it fakelore, but Wilgus was a genuine scholar. I'm just an old folkie who enjoys learning something about the songs he sings. That's why I drag Caroline up the Big Sandy river, or across the Ohio to Shawneetown, or over to Cairo, Illinois -- it's because we sing songs about those areas and we want to be able to visualize them when we sing 'em. Make sense?

I remember Art Thieme telling me how much he liked to arrive early in a small town where he was booked to do a program. It gave him time to visit the local historical society and learn something about where he was! I thought to myself, why didn't I do that? Then I remembered that when I sang, for instance, in the school in Sundance, Wyoming, I barely had time to catch my breath before the program began and then had to split immediately following it because there was another school fifty miles down the road expecting me in an hour. Same story in Ouray, Colorado, or Lawton, Oklahoma, or Lead, South Dakota. So I read a lot of regional history, along with the folklore books. Probably don't retain as much of it as I would if I were facing a final exam at the end of the term, but I was never comfortable in a classroom. Hated 'em, in fact!

With songs, I look at or listen to as many versions of a song as I can find, and then try to learn the one that speaks most clearly to me. Lowry C. Wimberley's study of the Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads has given me some significant insights. You might want to read that, as a good starter.

Sandy