Art, can't you tell by the sort of drawl and sometimes backward articulation that Bill D. and I am former midwesterners. (He's Kansas; I'm Nebraska, then Washington state). [I've been gone so long I've forgotten most of the outhouse jokes I knew. Nobody around here seems to know what those were. Wow, when you ran through the Sears Catlog pages and had to go to corn cobs, that really made a man out of you.] Anyway if my tooth fix holds I won't need a new crown.

Funny how tastes go, Doc Watson, I can take or leave, but Clarence Ashley, Doc Boggs, and a few others I loved, and still have records of many of their songs. I finally convinced one son that being a full time professional juggler wasn't really a red hot idea. Now he's a computer programer in Silicon Valley during the week and juggler on the weekends.

[This was typed up hours ago, then I got bogged down in some ABC's just sent to SCOTS-L, and forgot this one. But Joe Offer has now set the stage for it very nicely.]

It seems strange that in literature the author usually gets the credit, but except after they're famous the songwriters, usually don't.

I picked up a book on the all the songs that made the hit parade list from 1890 to 1954, 'Pop Memories' by Joel Whitburn, 1986. We find in it the singers, date song made the hit parade, position on the list, weeks on the list, band or ochestra acompanying the song, record label and number, just about everything except who wrote the song and who composed the tune.

One page in the back, p. 635, lists songwriters and composer of the 21 songs that won academy awards for movies songs, and the two pages following list the 40 songs and songwriters honored in the 'National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame'. P. 639 lists 30 songs from the Billboard Disc Jockey Polls. All these are a minuscule fraction of the total number of songs noted in the book. The performers get almost all of the credit. They should get some, but it seems to me that the major credit should go the the inventors.

But that seems to have always been the situation. I've seen it stated that the writers of the 17th century English broadside ballads got 1 shilling for each song accepted for publication. Entry in the Stationers' Register constituted copyright protection for the publisher, not the author. The Stationers' Register rarely name the author, and then only when the publisher wished to note it.

In spite of this we now know that Laurence Price wrote "The Demon Love/ House Carpenter" (Child #243, ZN2466), "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" (Child #106, ZN2944) and "Robin Hood's Golden Prize" (Child #147, RZN11). Folksongs versions of Price's other ballads are "Some Rival/ The American's have stolen my dearest away" (ZN1980) and "The Merry Haymakers" (ZN800). Evidence is incomplete, but he probably also wrote the English folk carol "All you that are to mirth inclined" ("The Sinner's Redemption", ZN112). I've heard most of these sung, but with never a mention of Price. Martin Parker, Thomas Robbins, Lawrence White, and Joseph Martin are among other 17th century ballad writers that wrote songs that have become folksongs. Samuel Smithson wrote a parody of the Robin Hood ballads (probably a dig at Thomas Robbins, who wrote 3 of them), (Child #150, RZN3), but Prof. Child, not quite fathoming Smithson's sense of humor, called it a silly ballad, precisely what Smithson intended.

I'm always a little annoyed when somebody asked for the singer[s] Z's song, then names a folksong, as if Z had invented the folksong. They are folksongs because they have outlasted at least two generations of singers. If it's Z's song and Z is still living it isn't a folksong in my book.