The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #103171   Message #2735563
Posted By: MGM·Lion
01-Oct-09 - 01:15 AM
Thread Name: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
Subject: RE: publication does a doubtful service to folksongs
... and at risk of appearing unduly to squeeze my own concertina [I don't play the trumpet], let me quote from what I wrote about Mrs Hogg in my article on Folklore in The Continuum Encyclopedia Of British Literature [NY 2003]:

'"They were made for singin' and no for readin', but ye hae broken the charm now, and they'll never be sung mair." Her words have been called prophetic, but the resultant decline in living folklore was probably a factor of the same influences that led to the folkloric researches of Scott and others in the first place — awareness that urbanization and the spread of easily accessible forms of popular entertainment (pleasure gardens, music-hall; later, radio, cinema, television, recording) were undermining those popular roots on which the uninhibited spread of living folklore depends, and a consequent desire to preserve what could be saved before it vanished entirely. Although the folk forms have turned out tougher than this pessimistic view suggested, it is true that, from the invention of printing onward, every technological and popular artistic development had tended to fix the form. Mrs Hogg, alas, was too late.'