There are them as which think milk comes into existence encapsulated in cardboard containers and potatoes are found by probing the gravy.

I am hardly ethnic, since I didn't grow up in that background and, frankly, I take a dim view of city kids raised on Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand doing their damnedest to try to sound like they just rode into town with a load of parsnips (lightly veiled shot at early Bob Dylan and clones). Strikes me as kinda phony. I'm hardly a purist because I've taken a batch of voice and classic guitar lessons and studied music in college, and when I learn a song or ballad, I sometimes get several versions together and come up with a composite version. But when I advocate learning more about the songs than just the words and tune and finding out where it came from and what it's all about, I sometimes get accused of being "ethnic" or a "purist." Not quite! I think all of that helps in putting more into performing a song that a mere rote recitation. Works for me.

Sometimes when I hear a singer-songwriter drone on tunelessly for twenty minutes while staring into his or her navel, I tend to sigh. Then I think of some of the great stuff singer-songwriters like Gordon Bok write, I relax a bit. If it weren't for singer-songwriters, we wouldn't have much to sing. Many of the older songs and ballads we sing came from minstrels and troubadours, or some working stiff with an ear for stringing words together and putting them to either a ready-made tune or one they cobble together themselves. Singer-songwriters. So it's kinda silly to put them down, even when the vast majority of songs that many of them crank out sink like a rock. The best songs tend to hang around. Sometimes for centuries.

I've met a number of collectors and ethnomusicologists, and within my experience, they do tend to be purists. "You're not singing that right!" I heard one at the 1964 Berkeley Folk Festival have a hissy-fit over the way Joan Baez slowed down a bit at the end of a ballad. Well, okay, fine. Sorry about that. But even though she didn't sing it quite the way it was done on the field recording, she did sing it beautifully and put the story across with panache.

If it weren't for people like these out collecting songs, and singer-songwriters putting them together in the first place, we city kids (including The Kingston Trio and The Limeliters) wouldn't have much to sing.

Bless 'em all! Listen to what they all say and learn all you can, but when you've done that, follow your own muse wherever it leads.   

Don Firth