 My name is Joe Offer, and I am a folk song addict. I started out on Peter, Paul and Mary; but, as the song says, “I soon hit the harder stuff.” In fact, it was Noel “Paul” Stookey who introduced me to the “harder stuff.” Noel had a copy of the Digital Tradition Folk Song Database on his computer bulletin board, and I soon got a copy of the database on floppy discs and installed it on my own computer. I found that the thousands of folk songs in the Digital Tradition were far more interesting and challenging than the stuff I’d learned from PP&M and Kingston Trio recordings. On October 1, 1996, a Pennsylvania man named Max Spiegel opened his Delta Blues Website as a home to the Digital Tradition database, and he also started a discussion forum so people could submit and request lyrics. He called the Website the Mudcat Café; and Max was its first “bartender,” assisted by Dick Greenhaus and Susan Friedman of the Digital Tradition. Max was 24 years old at the time, and many Mudcat users were twice his age. I joined Mudcat in January, 1997. I’ve posted over 20,000 messages there since then, so I guess I AM an addict (but the big-time posters have over 30,000). I became a moderator at Mudcat later in 1997, and since then I’ve been the primary “people contact person” for the Mudcat Café. Like the folk community, Mudcat is very non-hierarchical, so I’m not exactly sure what my function at Mudcat is – hey, I just know that I do it very well, and I have a great time doing it. Every year since 1999, I’ve attended San Francisco’s Camp Harmony and the annual Getaway of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, partly to get to know the people I’ve met at Mudcat. I even made trips to England and Ireland to meet Mudcatters and enjoy their music. In the 12 years since it started, Mudcat has become a worldwide community of folk musicians and fans. We have 22,547 registered members, and countless other guests stop in occasionally to look up a song or add a comment. We’ve had almost 2.5 million messages posted at Mudcat, and over 116,00 discussion threads on a wide spectrum of topics. Participants are free to spend their time in our "BS" section in chit-chat and political discussion and recipe exchanges and discussions of just about everything under the sun. Heck, we've even had Mudcat romances, including one or two that ended up in marriage. As for me, I stay at Mudcat for the folk music. A quick check brings up almost 150 discussion threads on various types of instrument strings, countless threads on guitars, and we even have 13 (count ‘em) threads on nyckelharpas!
But my favorite Mudcat threads are the song threads. If we research a song, we research it thoroughly, and we often come up with ten different versions of the lyrics of a song. If we can't find a song, we keep looking - some of our song searches have taken ten years, but we always find our song. As we go along, we learn all sorts of fascinating stories about the songs and the singers and the songmakers. I started a thread on the songs of Jean Ritchie, and Jean Ritchie herself has been helping me with it. Art Thieme (Chicago) and Kendall Morse (Maine) and John Roberts (England & US) have often helped us with song research, and they’ve told us marvelous stories about the backgrounds of songs. Eliza Carthy is an occasional participant, as is former Weavers member Frank Hamilton. These are only a few of the "moderately well-known" folk musicians who have participated in Mudcat discussions over the years. -Joe Offer, AKA joe@mudcat.org- |