Lizzie Cornish. "...these songs were sung by people who didn't give a shite about the history of them..."

Brian Peters. "You never met Bob Copper, then."

Sorry, but that comment of Lizzie's has been bugging me ever since this thread started, and it goes way beyond Bob Copper's burgeoning knowledge. Traditional singers in fact seldom had a scholarly knowledge of the songs they sang. But as anyone who ever talked to Paddy Tunney or Willie Scott or Fred Jordan will realise, they invariably had a detailed understanding of the folk history of their surroundings, and the parts which songs played in that history.

A few examples:

- Betsy Whyte's comment at the end of Young Johnson (Child 88). The Muckle Sangs. Greentrax CDTRAX 9005
- A fascinating weekend which I once spent with Joe Rae of Bigholm in Ayrshire. What that man didn't know about Ayrshire, and about the songs he sang could have been written down on the back of a postage stamp.
- An equally fascinating morning spent with John Kennedy during which he talked in great detail about the songs and folkways of Culleybackey in Antrim.
- A five hour long interview which Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger conducted in 1964, and which I edited for Musical Traditions magazine. It can be read at http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/heaney.htm . Yes there are places in it where Heaney obviously feels pushed to come up with an answer, and the information he come out with is often inaccurate. But could someone who (in a different context), said the following, seriously be accused of not giving a shite about the history? "What I wanted to find out more than anything else was; why do people have to suffer? Why was there two acres of land and twenty five acres of rock? And why was there such a thing as somebody with a thousand acres to run their hounds and horses through the fields and collect their money after them? What did they do to deserve it? I suddenly hated the people who did it, you know, oh, the history...." And in case you think Joe Heaney was a one off, Connemara is replete with people who share just that kind of knowledge
- The huge amount of actuality material which MacColl and Seeger collected from the Elliotts of Birtley.
- The even more monumental collection of material which they recorded from The Stewarts of Blair. (Both sets of recordings are in the National Sound Archive, and in Ruskin College library of Oxford University by the way.)
- An interview between Harry Cox and Alan Lomax in which Harry talks with bitter eloquence about the game laws and about the treatment of poachers.

Traditional singers seldom retailed the kind of history you'd find in textbooks. But to accuse these people of not giving a shite about the history of the songs they sang is to demean their intelligence and to undervalue the importance of their artistry. It is in effect to accuse them of singing songs they could not have understood.