"All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song. - Louis Armstrong"
Some time ago I was taken to task by an American contributor to Mudcat (I think it was the admirable Don Firth) for pouring scorn on this statement. He pointed out that whoever said it (I've heard it attributed to Armstrong, Broonzy and at least two other singers) intended it as a clever riposte and certainly not a serious statement on their music. I think this is probably right, the real joke being in those who quote it as a basis for their analysis of folk song.
When we started collecting we did so for the usual reason; to gather in as many songs as we could. This changed very quickly when we began to discover how little we understood of the field we were working in, and when we realised how much information was available to us from the singers we were meeting. If our work has any importance, I believe it lies in the extensive interviews we carried out with some of the singers.
From Kerry Traveller, Mikeen McCarthy we got masses of information on the transmission of the songs and stories via the 'ballads', the song sheets sold around the fairs and markets of rural Ireland right up to the mid-fifties, also through his activities as a street and pub singer. He explained how, after he had taught the tunes of the songs to town-dwellers, he heard them "sung back" at him months later adapted to suit their new environment. He also talked about the different styles used for different circumstances – street selling, pub singing and what he called "fireside singing", that done in the intimacy of his home (caravan) among family and friends.
From blind Travelling woman, Mary Delaney, we got the intense emotional involvement which went into her singing. Mary could have doubled the 100 plus songs she gave us with C&W pieces she had sucked up vacuum cleaner-like, but persistently refused to sing them for us because, as she said, "the new songs have the old ones ruined". The old (folk) songs she referred to as "My daddies' songs" even though she had learned only around a dozen of them from her father.
From West Clare small farmer Tom Lenihan we recorded hours of his emotional approach to his songs and how he adapted that approach when he sang.
From Walter Pardon we got an articulate and extremely intelligent analysis of 'folk song' (a term he persistently used) and how they compared to the non-folk material in his repertoire.

The point I am trying to make (not very well) is that, contrary to the somewhat vacuous use that is made of the 'talking horse' statement, all the singers we questioned had a separate take on the songs we/I chose to refer to as 'folk' and regarded them in a different light than they did their 'other' songs. Contrary to what I have consistently been told down the years, singers did not lump all their songs together as 'songs'.

For anybody who doesn't know what Walter Pardon had to say on the matter, some of it can be found on the Musical Traditions web-site in the Enthusiasms section as part of a reply 'Wot I Rote' to an article Mike Yates had written previously. Mike's piece is entitled 'The Other Songs' and mine, 'By Any Other Name'. There is also an article on Walter by Pat and I in a festschrift for collector Tom Munnelly, ('Dear, Far-Voiced Veteran') entitled 'A Simple Countryman?' This latter is still available on the OAC web-site, but anybody who would like a copy of the article can PM me with an e-mail address.   
I also wrote a piece on Mikeen McCarthy called 'Mikeen McCarthy – Ballad Seller' which was included in 'Singer, Song, Scholar', edited by Ian Russell and published by Sheffield University (probably out of print, but again, I'm happy to send copies to anybody interested.

I apologise for this bit of 'the articles wot I rote' self-promotion, but I do feel that too often these arguments take place on the assumption that the singers had nothing worthwhile while to say, which is, in our experience, far from the case. The older collectors may have been romantics with all the faults attributed to them, but at least they based their ideas on often hard, painstaking work carried out at the folk-face and not from the comfort of University chairs or from the protective bubble of the folk club.
Jim Carroll