Scene:   The Place Next Door (a coffeehouse in Seattle's Wallingford District).
Time:   Sometime in the very early 1960s.

I get a request for "The Sloop John B." So I sing it. When I finish, the requester is not totally pleased. Reason? "That's not the way the Kingston Trio does it!"

Back story:   I had been singing "The Sloop John B." for nearly ten years, having learned it from Carl Sandburg's American Songbag and may have inadvertently changed a word or two since I first learned it, since I had also heard it sung live by a few other people and on a record or two, probably recorded well before the members of the Kingston Trio had even met each other. But there could not have been more than a word or two's difference between the way I sang it and the way I had learned it from Sandburg. And comparing the KT's recorded version with the written music in Sandburg, the KT had changed more words than I had, and had also altered the rhythmic structure of the song by quite a bit.

"No," I quipped to my critic. "You see, there are three of them and there's only one of me." (Laugh from the rest of the audience.)

Far more annoying than this sort of thing is when I sing a song that I've known for years and someone tells me, "You're not doing it right! That's not the same words that are in The Blue Book!"

Well—T. bloody S. is my response to that!

That sort of appeal to the "absolute authority" of a phonograph record or a song book can be the death of the folk process if you allow it to go unchallenged.

Don Firth