Personally I know little about, and am not particularly interested in Dave Bulmer. He sounds a rather unpleasant individual whose behaviour resembles that of a collector who has been discussed ad nauseum on this forum (and who found much support from some quarters). Bulmer has concentrated his activities mainly towards established revival performers who, to my mind, are quite capable of fighting their own corner and are able to employ agents and solicitors to speak up on their behalf if necessary.
I took the subject of this thread to be 'collecting' which, to me, refers to our relationship with traditional performers.
The subject of payment for the recording of traditional singers is a tricky one. In thirty odd years I have never known the subject to have come up with field singers unless we raised it ourselves. The older singers learned their songs because they enjoyed, and were interested in them. We have always found them ore than happy to pass them on to us, and it has been our opinion that to offer payment would have given offence and would have altered our relationship radically with those we have known. I have never known singers claim 'ownership' of the songs and to offer payment for their time and 'effort' seems like flying in the face of the staggering generosity we have invariably been shown. Most of the people we recorded, we got to know well, and a number of them we have regarded as close friends.
The only time the question of payment has been raised is in context of the public use that the material may be put to, albums, radio or television broadcasts etc. In these cases we have undertaken to pass on ALL money gained from such use. Where that has not been possible, because of the death of singers, or (particularly in the case of Travellers) because of our losing touch with them, we have undertaken to plough the proceeds back into the music by donating it to bodies such as the National Sound Archive or Irish Traditional Music Archive. In this way, we have not personally profited from the recordings and thus, as far as the singers are concerned, have 'kept our hands clean'.
Unfortunately, the majority of record purchasers have, by and large, preferred their folk songs sung by Martin Carthy, Peter Bellamy, June Tabor et al, rather than Harry Cox, Cecilia Costello and Jeannie Robertson. The sales of albums of such magnificent and important singers as Robert Cinnamond and John Reilly have been so pitifully small that they have not even covered the production costs, let alone made a profit. The result is that any collectors wishing to make generally available their recordings, have had to either finance their albums themselves or get record companies or institutions to foot the bill.
There is much more to be said about the morality of collecting, particularly regarding the treatment of field singers, both by the revival and by researchers, but these postings are getting to be far too bloody long so, hopefully, if people are interested, to be continued.......
Jim Carroll
PS My favourite story on payment for recording was told by collector Cairán MacMathúna when he was recording for his radio programme 'Job of Journeywork'. He had taken down some tunes from an elderly fiddle player in Kerry, after which he said, "There will be a small recording fee for this".
The old man thought for a second and said, "I'll be taking a bullock to the market tomorrow, so I should be able to pay you then".