Pip (and McGrath of Harlow)
"The 'folk sound', for me, is the sound of the speaking voice"
This can't be said too often - that's exactly what it is.
Most of the older singers, from whom we all got our songs (and should have got our information - but didn't) pitched their voices more-or-less around their speaking tones - they sang as they spoke. They also tended to sing in speech patterns, not breaking up words, taking the breath in the appropriate places (where state-of-health allowed) so that the songs came out as pieces of continuous narrative. Virtually all the older singers that we interviewed made it clear that they considered themselves storytellers whose stories came with a tune. In the west of Ireland they talk about 'telling a song' rather than singing it.
This does not mean that you can't enjoy an opera singer singing folk songs - it just means you have to listen to it with a different ear - with a different set of values. I quite like classical singing - as music, not as narrative (most of the operas are written in languages I don't understand anyway). Try reading through and enjoying a libretto as a story - I've never been able to. On the other hand, Peter Pears' rendition of 'The Lyke Wake Dirge' can make the hairs on the back of my neck bristle - as music.
The objective of the classical composer is different from that of the anonymous song makers - whoever they were; listen to the orchestral compositions.
George Butterworth's beautiful, rich, gentle, sweeping, all-embracing 'Banks of Green Willow - is about a woman made pregnant, cast adrift in an open boat and drowned along with her newborn baby. Vaughan Williams' extremely lyrical 4th Norfolk Rhapsody is based on a song which tells of a ship's apprentice abused, tortured and finally beaten to death by a sadistic sea captain. As I said - different objectives.
By the way; these (extremely interesting and thought-provoking) threads only work if you leave out terms like 'snobbish' and the particularly disturbing 'racist'; in my experience people who prefer one approach to another do so as a matter of taste - not because they secretly want to burn a cross on your lawn.
Jim Carroll