Don and Bob,

Thanks for the heads up about this thread. Even after three-plus years, I often find myself with an outrageous pun on my hands, wishing I had Dad to send it to. As it happens, I do have many recordings of his on my hands, though they are in storage right now. I'd love to do something with them both academically and Song-Circle-wise. One of these days I'll be able to record some of his tapes onto CDs. And I do intend to make both the recordings and his books available to those interested in collecting folksongs.

As an adult I find I still have a child's response to some of the songs he sang during my childhood. Last year someone made a remark about the Ezra Pound parody "Winter is a Coomin In" (I may have misspelled this) and I made a remark about "egg you hath my ham" making no sense. But then, I learned that song when I was in my Dr. Suess days. Dad explained a lot of his songs to us, but that one got past me. A Shakespearean scholar friend nearly fell out of his chair laughing, then explained it was "ague hath my ham," an ENTIRELY different meaning. Many of Dad's songs were sung when we were supposedly out of earshot, but all it took was one hearing of some of them and we had them down. And usually sang them at the top of our lungs in the back yard as we played on the swingset. All of those hoots, when you were singing in the living room downstairs, we were sitting upstairs at the heater duct listening. ;-)

Don Firth wrote a wonderful article about Dad that appeared in _Sing Out!_ some months after his death. I work (not surprisingly) in a university library, and have been reading a fair amount about copyright issues. I can't say whether _Sing Out_ is copyrighted, but I would be willing to guess that Don didn't give away all rights to it when he submitted it. As the author it is his to give or sell, and I doubt he would encounter difficulties if he ran it here. And it might bring a few more readers to _Sing Out!_.

My two cents-- Maggie