So many posts in the last 24 hours, so much to respond to....

First, many thanks to Vic for taking the trouble to share the article from Folk News – I know what a bugger it is to scan indistinct text then to have to correct it!

Obviously there’s quite a lot of crossover with the various other interviews out there – Uncle Billy, the ‘baulk’, etc., but it’s fascinating to find other details such as WP’s view of revival singers and their use of accompaniment – which didn’t make it into the partial transcript of this interview that appeared in the booklet for the ‘Put a Bit of Powder...’ CD. Another thing I find interesting is that Billy Gee taught Walter a significant number of songs that don’t appear to have been in his own regular repertoire; one thought arising from this is that the contrast between WP’s intimate singing style and Uncle Billy’s declamatory pub performances may be less of a factor if Billy actually taught him the songs in a relaxed home setting – on his knee according to WP’s account elsewhere.

It would be interesting to see the questions that were posed to WP in these two interviews, which brought forth this particular set of responses. The interview posted earlier in which Jim Carroll and Pat McKenzie talk to WP is much more transparent, in that both questions and answers are (apparently) noted verbatim. However, excerpts from this latter interview have been posted above to illustrate examples of alleged “leading questions” designed to elicit “the answer that the interlocutors want”. I’ve re-read this text, and I can’t agree. The fact that WP sees mental pictures of the songs as he sings, that the characters appear in period dress, and that ‘The Pretty Ploughboy’ is imagined working in a neighbouring field, all originate from the singer. JC follows up this last with a question about ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, but he is merely following the precedent set by WP in describing the mental picture for a specific song. The opening question asking what WP – who was previously unused to performing for audiences – sees when standing in front of a crowd, seems entirely reasonable. One wonders in what way these answers are the ones “the interlocutors want[ed]” and, if so, why they wanted them. Unless an interviewer is simply going to press ‘Record’, say “off you go, Walter,” and leave the tape running uninterrupted for the afternoon, it’s difficult to see how any potential questions on the theme of singing could avoid interpretation by our OP as ‘loaded’.

After the attacks by Dave Harker on the concept of folk song and the work of the people who collected it, it became almost the default academic position to mistrust the work of collectors, to accuse them of ’bias’, and of allowing their ‘ideology’ to come before an honest appraisal of their material. To paraphrase Jeremy Paxman, the question “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” became more interesting to many scholars than the actual songs and singers (in which many of them seemed uninterested), and their main efforts were devoted to discrediting previous work than contributing anything useful of their own. In the words of Steve Roud, “this essentially negative perspective became... the new orthodoxy”. We’ve had forty years of that orthodoxy now, and it’s really time we all moved on.