After some absence (and never particularly intense presence in the discussion forum) I have just come by this site again and I thought that by way of reintroduction I'd tell you of my involvement in the DT, with an attached apology to all users of the database.

I first discovered the DT back in 1992 when I was a poor undergraduate and thought I knew considerably more about folk music than I actually did. Now as then, was extremely impressed by the scope and by the work that Dick has put into keeping it a going concern. As you all know, by now it has multiple versions of just about any common song, but back then there were still a few glaring omissions (or so I thought) and so I spent much of the following months in a therapeutical effort to avoid revising for my finals and instead trying to fill as many of these lyric omissions as I possibly could, collecting them all into one big text file. Most of this came from various lyric sheets and folk song collections, but a fair few of them were transcriptions from records, all augmented with cobbled-together notes that were mostly interpolated from various half-remembered sources.

After somehow managing to pass my finals after all, I then sent the entire text file of about 300 songs plus several hundred annotations and corrections to existing songs in one single e-mail to Dick in the summer of 1993. To his credit, Dick was very gracious about it and after some much-needed deletions by way of quality control, added much of this mixed bag to the database. And there they still remain -- at latest count 137 songs, easily distinguished by the initials "MJ" at the bottom.

Being confronted with the results of my youthful conceit, some of these 137 entries now make embarrassing reading, partly because the formatting of that big batch e-mail got mangled somewhere and a fair few of my original notes became truncated into a state where they make little sense, but mostly because of the staggering (in hindsight) number of blatantly obvious mistranscriptions that I managed to include, some of them corrected in later editions and some not, and to a mercifully somewhat lesser extent because of some annotations and comments that I have to admit were based on guesswork and again in hindsight sometimes simply wrong.

The upshot if which is: If any of you ever come across words or lines that seem wrong or make no sense in any of my entries, you're probably right and I'm wrong and the same probably applies if you happen to disagree with any of the notes in those entries. A sincere apology to anybody who has been wrongfooted by this in the last six years or so -- 'tis all my youthful folly...

Martin PS: Many thanks again to Dick for his patience and all those encouraging words!