I'm ba-a-a-a-a-a-ack! Sorry about that, but I thought I'd look in from time to time and occasionally kibbitz as I lurk up here in the chandelier.

"At this time I interrupt the Don & Ron Show to point out that there's a difference between 'getting' someone's point and buying the point."

Well spotted, Uncle Dave!

As to the idea that if it were not for singer-songwriters adding to the repertoire, we soon wouldn't have anything to sing (colorfully and acrobatically described as disappearing "up our own backsides"), I have a working repertoire of a couple hundred songs (what I tend to call "folk songs," ones where the authors' names are not recorded in history and that have been around anywhere from several centuries to fairly recent times—along with several that I don't regard as folk songs, some of which are old and some new, where the author is known, and that are not generally sung except by professional singers), I know a couple hundred more that I would need to refresh because I haven't sung them for some time, and several thousand more in books and on records, tapes, or CDs that I would like to learn and sing, but I doubt that I will live long enough to absorb more than a small fraction of them.

And most of the singers of folk songs that I know personally, such as Bob (Deckman) Nelson, Nancy Quensé, Stewart (Stewart) Hendrickson, Mike (miken) Nelson, John Weiss, Judy Flenniken, and a couple dozen more, have repertoires as big as mine and are constantly learning new songs. Folk songs, by the strict, hard-nosed, academic definition. We know many of the same songs. But we each know many songs that the others don't. And we learn songs from each other (a la good old fashioned folk tradition), but there again, none of us will live long enough to learn all of each others' repertoires.

So I don't lose much sleep over the danger of running out of songs to sing!

Jim Carroll says, "I often wonder why many singer/songwriters are so desperate to label their compositions 'folk' especially as so many of them are in the forefront of those claiming that definitions are unimportant.

Perhaps if they removed their names from their songs and didn't copyright them they might make the grade..... but I won't hold my breath!"

I echo that wonderment.

(Okay, I'll crawl back up in the chandelier. For now.)

Don Firth