Exactly so, Kendall. This is why, when I learn a song like Greensleeves or Lord Randal or Barbara Allen or Edward, I do some judicious editing. All of these songs can run on for what seems like hours, repeating the same verse format with only minor variations ("mother . . . father . . . sister . . . brother . . . Uncle Fred . . . the dog . . . .").

In days gone by, songs like this were regarded as an evening's entertainment, but modern audiences find this sort of repetition tedious or worse. So I take a verse or two of this sort of thing to get the gist of it and just drop the rest. Now, some tight-lipped folklorist may take issue with this sort of editing, but I fall back on a couple of words spoken to my by Prof. David C. Fowler (A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, Duke University Press 1968), from whom I took an excellent class on "The Popular Ballad" when I was at the University of Washington. There were several singers in this class and sometimes the class wound up being a song-fest. When I did a somewhat truncated version of a ballad, Dr. Fowler asked me where I had learned that version. I confessed that I had edited a version I had learned from John and Sylvia Kolbs, A Treasury of Folk Songs (Bantam Books, 1948), and threw myself on his mercy. He assured me that there was nothing wrong with editing a song they way I had done. "The academician, the folk song collector," he said, "is obligated to write down all that he hears. But the singer, such as yourself, is primarily an entertainer. You need to be judicious in what you feel will be entertaining and not bore your audience. If you can do that and still be true to the spirit of the song, I would say you have succeeded. I would call this "a minstrel's prerogative."

A minstrel's prerogative. I like that!

Don Firth