Random ruminations on a slow morning at the Skunk Works:

As long as we're sort of beating this thing from all sides, there are a number of other factors that were strongly influential on the whole folk music "scene" (if we still want to call it a "scene").

All of this material could have faded into the mists of antiquity had it not been for people such as Bishop Thomas Percy who rescued an tattered manuscript (he was visiting friends and their maid was using it to start the morning fire in his room) and discovered that it contained the words to old songs and ballads—old in 1765. This became the material for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Then people like Sir Walter Scott collecting Scottish border ballads, sometimes using ballad materials in his novels. Most early collectors, as far up as Francis J. Child, were mainly interested in these ballads as poetry rather than songs and didn't bother to collect melodies.

I think it was in the late nineteenth or very early twentieth century that a fair number of folks began collecting the tunes as well. But often they would hear something they thought was a bit odd in the melody sung by a source singer and wrote down what they thought should be the correct notes. Cecil J. Sharp was the first to write down, not what he thought the notes should be, but what he actually heard. Later analysis of the melodies revealed that the "wrong notes" the source singers were singing were not wrong at all:   the modes, particularly Dorian and Mixolydian, were still alive and well and living in folk music.

Then, in the United States, along came the Lomaxes, Sandburg, and others, and we're off and running.

Trivia that's fun to quote to get Martin Gibson to call you a "snob" and a "purist" (I regard that as like getting a Nobel Prize):—

It was a German philosopher, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), who, as far as anyone knows, was the first person to use the term "folksong" (volkslieder). He was refering to the songs and music of "the rural peasant class."   [We tend to reject the idea of a class system, however.]   He felt that writers and composers should study this material in order to get back to the roots and give their works a more regional or nationalistic flavor. Then, of course, there were the Brothers Grimm. They were into collecting both folk music and folk tales. Many of the fairly tales they wrote up had been around as folk tales for who knows how long? (Here's a helluva discussion for a whole different thread:   Did Walt Disney introduce generations of children to old German folk tales??).

Now, am I trying to equate Walt Disney and the Kingston Trio? Just a random association that flitterd by like a moth with the hiccups, but no, I'm not sure that line of though is really worth pursuing . . . .

Don Firth