It's not that I don't respect your opinions, Ron, but I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree about this matter.

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During the 1950s and into the mid 1960s, I knew a fellow who had been a local restaurateur who played the guitar and was a sometime singer of folk songs (I shall identify him as "Bob C."). Bob sang well, knew a lot of songs, and enjoyed singing at parties and songfests. People enjoyed his singing, and even though he was dragooned once into singing on local television, he didn't seem to have any great interest in becoming a professional performer.

Sometime in the late 1950s, Bob C. was present at a late-night party where a knock-down-drag-out fight of monumental proportions took place between two of his acquaintances. He felt that this epic battle was the stuff of which great folk songs are made, and it deserved to be written up in song. So even though he didn't consider himself to be any kind of a songwriter, he set himself to the task. As a starting point, he picked a traditional folk song (approved and ordained as a genuine folk song since it's included in Folk Song U.S.A., compiled by John and Alan Lomax, and recorded by Pacific Northwest folk singer Walt Robertson on his first record for Folkways). The song Bob chose told the story of a similar fight in a logging camp. He took the tune wholesale, but wrote an original set of words, patterning his song along the lines of the "original," much the way Woody Guthrie wrote many of the songs he did. And Bob came up with one helluva song!

He sang it around a bit. In fact, once they'd heard it, people requested it from him. Subsequently, I learned it from him and I sang it around a bit. Other than just the two of us, I don't recall ever hearing anyone else sing it.

It was new words set to a traditional tune (the not uncommon practice of a new song growing out of an older one). It tells a story of a kind very commonly heard in folk songs. And since it does tell a story, it is, by definition, a ballad (although it bears no Child number, obviously). It has the additional virtues of being both funny (even the fellow who lost the fight acknowledged that the song was "pretty funny") and true—including in a manner that even Bob C. didn't know about at the time he wrote it. It has far better "folk song" credentials and it is most certainly more of a folk song that anything I've heard recently produced by the current crop of singer-songwriters, with the possible exception of something written by Gordon Bok. By almost all criteria, Bob C.'s song is indeed a "folk song." Except one.

I do not regard it as a folk song, nor, do I think, would Bob C. In fact, I don't think Bob C. even cared whether people thought of it as a folk song or not.

There is a very good reason that I do not regard it as a folk song—yet. I haven't seen Bob C. since sometime in the mid-1960s, and I understand he left town about that time. Nor have I heard anything from him or about him. As far as I know, unless Bob C. is still among the living, I am the only person in the world who knows this song and can sing it.

Don Firth