Yeah, Jack, here I am, well into the august state of geezerhood, and nobody ever told me! I've been living in abject ignorance all my life and transgressing horribly on the limits of cultural boundaries with my singing of songs and ballads other than what I heard in my immediated surroundings on Oak Knoll Avenue in Pasadena back before I was ten years old. Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa! Oh, woe! Oh, remose! Oh, guilt! Sack cloth! Ashes!

But one of the things I did hear back then was a radio program called "The American School of the Air," and one of the programs was Alan Lomax's program on American folk music (I had no idea who Alan Lomax was until ten or fifteen years later). They had other music programs as well, featuring the folk music of all lands, particularly English-speaking countries (I heard a lot of Irish songs sung by John McCormack, Scottish comic songs sung by Harry Lauder, and various somgs by many other singers). So this undoubtedly how my education became muddled and I was led into the sin and transgression of singing songs like Jock o'Braidesley, Dick Darby the Cobbler, and David of the White Rock. But how was I to know??

Well, David, I guess you'd rather not hear me sing any of the songs that audiences have been expecting and requesting of me since I first began singing for audiences back in the mid-1950s, such as the aforementioned, or standard, classic songs and ballads such as Greensleeves, Barbara Allen, Lord Randal, Early One Morning, The Braes of Yarrow, or any of the others that I have been singing for years in coffeehouses, clubs, in concert, and on television and radio.

You see, David, a large part of the problem with the American songs that you want me to sing exclusively is that—well, take The Streets of Laredo for example:   it, like many Americans such as myself, have Old World forebears. It is an English song, The Dying Soldier's Lament, modified slightly to fit new circumstances. And this is only one of a huge list of such songs. The vast majority of "American" folk songs have a similar genealogy.

And I think you will find, should you be motivated to look, that many of the folk songs of your "good English culture" can be traced back in a similar manner to immigrant songs—songs that originally came from other cultures. I had a friend who did a term paper on English folk ballads, and he found in his wide-ranging research that many of the same songs he encountered in Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads had counterparts all over Europe—particularly in the Scandinavian countries.

So if I should be limited to singing only the songs of my own culture, then the question arises:   What is my culture?

True, I am an American. But what does that mean? Am I Californian? That's where I was born. Am I a Washingtonian? I have lived most of my life in Seattle, Washington. But my father's grandfather was Scottish and my mother's parents were Swedish. Living in a city as I do, and have most of my life, I don't hear much indigeonous folk music unless I deliberately seek it out on recordings and specific radio stations--or go to places where folk music, specifically, is performed.

You see, unless I actively seek it out, folk music itself is not an integral part of the culture in which I live.

And what of the matter of regional accents? There are many regional accents in the United States. In two boroughs of New York City, one can distinguish between the accents of someone who grew up in Brooklyn and someone who grew up in The Bronx. In the South, the accent you hear in Louisiana is not the same as the accent you hear in Georgia. Texas, Kansas, North Dakota, Montana, all have different accents to someone whose ear is tuned to regional accents.

And what about me? I took broadcasting training and worked many years as a radio announcer and newscaster. My broadcast training included the purging of regional accents to be replaced by a sort of "standard English" (which is to say, standard American English). The result is that I'm quite sure that neither Professor Henry Higgins nor Zoltan Karpathy could tell what part of the United States I live—or lived—in.

Add to this that, if I do say so myself, I am a talented mimic, and by listening carefully and doing a bit of practice, I can do accents quite well. I consider this a part of my art. After all, in addition to being a ballad scholar, I am an entertainer.

If you don't want to listen to me do anything but American songs, I guess I can come up with a few "Possum up a gum stump" ditties for you. But to do those, I would have to adopt an accent which comes, perhaps, even less naturally to me than adopting a Scottish accent.

Don Firth