Hi Al,
Thanks for the warm words, but I don't know that I do have anything engraved on tablets for the benefit of modern practitioners. Most of the young singers and musicians that I know are pretty good at finding out stuff for themselves. However, I'll tell you about my bailiwick (ooh, missus!) since you asked.

I've made my living from music for over 30 years, and I've always sung and made music informally as well, just for the pleasure of it. Reading Bert Lloyd in the early days inspired me to look at the songs as more than just entertainment - there are many layers beyond the actual song: the history of the time, the evolution of the songs themselves, the stories of the people who sang them, and the work of the collectors who preserved them. I disagree with people who pop up on Mudcat from time to time to tell me that analysis somehow damages the songs because they already 'speak for themselves'. Of course they can be enjoyed purely as songs, and I never forget that as a pro I'm there to entertain every audience I play for - but all the layers are there for those of us who want to explore them.

I've always believed in digging for songs that aren't the same ones that everyone else is doing, and that's taken me into the work of F J Child, and the collectors like Sharp, Gardiner, the Hammonds and so on. That's led me in turn into research and teaching, which frankly hasn't been a bad career move, since quite a lot of my work over the last decade or two has been in teaching. A number of years ago I began a project with my American friend Jeff Davis (whose music is wonderful, BTW) on Cecil Sharp's Appalachian collection - we took our presentation to the Library of Congress amongst many other venues. That made me appreciate the incredible feats of endurance, perseverance and intellectual curiosity that Sharp had shown in his travels with the indefatigable Maud Karpeles and, the more I found out about him, the more I respected his work. I also began to realise that a lot of negative comment I'd read about him was palpably untrue. Fakesong is not the only source of misinformation about Sharp, but it has been very influential - especially in the field of cultural studies - even though many researchers into folk song itself have more or less dismissed it. So I tend to view it through the prism of the attack on Sharp which, though obviously not the sole focus of the book, seems to have been the starting point (given the 1972 paper) and the centre of the attempt to debunk the notion of 'folk song'. It's been interesting to me to find out more about, for instance, the work of Motherwell in the course of this thread.

Sharp was writing over a 100 years ago, and produced his theoretical work (the first attempt, really, in the field) only four years after collecting his first song, so obviously he got some things wrong - though Roud and Bishop, for instance, are very positive about his work on modal scales. Anyway, although I sometimes enjoy a good argument on Mudcat, and like to correct misinformation when I see it, I've no intention of getting into a fight about Cecil Sharp in this thread, despite some wildly ill-informed comments above.

This probably wasn't what you wanted at all, Al, but I'm trying to explain what motivates me in the context of the present discussion.