I think some folks are taking this accent/dialect thing ("Do it!"—"Don't do it!") a bit too far.

First of all, when I say that I adopt, for example, a Scottish dialect when singing something like The Bonnie Earl of Moray, I'm not talking about stuffing my mouth with bannocks and crowdie before I sing and becoming generally incomprehensible. I'm talking about singing the line "Ye hielands and ye lowland, oh, where hae ye been?" that way, not "translating it into "English" by changing the words to "You highlands and you lowlands, oh where have you bean?" With that kind of song, switching to an "English translation" takes the song out of context, takes the starch out of the song, and is just plain silly.

I sing the words as indicated, and I've noticed (along with records of other Scottish singers, I have a lot of Jean Redpath records and I've heard her in person several times, including at a songfest when she visited Seattle a couple of decades ago) the way that Scots pronounce certain consonants, e.g., they tend to speak "Rs" with a little flip of the tongue and more forward in the mouth than English or Americans do (unlike the Parisian French, who tuck "Rs" into the back of the throat). Okay, so I do that, too. For the duration of the song. I am not translating it into another language. I really don't sing all that many songs in dialect, but with those I do, I'm sure my audiences fully understand what's going on, even though some of the words may sound a little different from what they hear every day. I'm just going with the flow of the song, doing what feels natural.

My point in bringing up opera being musically best when sung in its original language is to illustrate the tight relationship between words and music. Most opera buffs bone up on the plot before going to a performance, particularly if it's an opera they're not familiar with. Regular opera-goers are not as dependent on hearing and understanding the specific words. They already know what the plot is before the lights go down and the curtain goes up. At this point, the music and the individual performances are more important to them than following the plot word by word.

This is not the case with ballads. The music is important, yes. But the main thing is the story. So it's paramount that the audience be able to hear and understand the words. In a three hour opera, there is only one story (and possibly a sub-plot or two) to keep in mind. The audience at a folk concert may hear a dozen or more different ballads—stories—along with other songs over the course of the concert, many of which may be entirely knew to lots of people in the audience.

With ballads, the music acts as a vehicle for the story. In opera, the story acts as a vehicle for the music.

And no, GUEST,memyself, I don't really think that the folks Vance Randolph collected songs from in the Ozarks need to know much of anything about opera.

Hey, it ain't rocket science, folks.

Don Firth