Referring to Marc Bernier's post above (30 May 08 - 09:08 a.m.), I'm afraid he is the victim of some kind of stereotyped thinking.

On a balmy summer evening in 1963, I sang several folk songs and ballads to a crowd of some 6,000 people (police crowd estimate) gathered on the large lawn/amphitheater in front of the Horiuchi mural at the Seattle Center on the occasion of one of the Wednesday evening Seattle Center Hootenannies. Most of the songs I sang that evening I had been singing for several years, but whether or not my renditions were "beautiful" I will leave for others to say. I was accompanying myself on a classical guitar, hand made in Madrid, that I had paid something like $350 for (I would probably have to pay ten times that for the same guitar now). I was not singing complex vocal arrangements since I was singing solos, and the only polyphony involved was that I usually work out accompaniments in which, instead of merely strumming, I play specific strings or combinations of strings intended to harmonize with the melody.

I was one of about a dozen performers that evening, some performing solo, some in groups. As to having large amounts of money behind us, I believe we did have the resources of—what was it? The Seattle Parks Department? I'm not sure. They were trying to provide attractions for the general public to encourage them to make use of the relatively new facilities at the Seattle Center (a legacy from the Seattle World's Fair the previous year), and we were asked to perform because we were all fairly well-known singers of folk songs in the area. As to being paid vast quantities of money (on the order of, say, the Rolling Stones), if I remember correctly, we were each paid $25 per performance.

I believe that if anyone in that audience became interested enough in folk music to want to learn to sing and play folk songs (and although we weren't paid a great deal for these performances, I usually gained a guitar student or two almost every time I did one), then we were not just "making money," we were helping to keep alive the folk tradition.

Folk songs do not need to be confined to the kitchen, the fo'c'sle, the front porch of a cabin in the Ozarks, or sung at the rump of a mule while plowing the south forty for then to still be folk songs.

Don Firth