We spent thirty plus years recording songs from source singers (singers who provided the musical link between us and the singing tradition).
The spirit in which we asked for the songs and the stories was that we did not want them to die out, and this is the spirit in which they were invariably given.
The material we collected was public domain, so there was never any question of 'ownership' of it, it was 'folk song', pure and simple, then and now.
The only question of payment came from public use of the actual recordings we made. We contracted with the singers and storytellers that any payment arising from that use would go to them or, if that were not possible, would somehow or other be ploughed back into the music. As virtually all the singers we recorded are now dead, we honour this by donating all proceeds from albums we have released to The Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin, a body set up to archive, make accessible, and promote traditional music. All the recordings we made are deposited in ITMA, the National Sound Archive at the British Library and in various other such bodies, with full public access and hopefully they will be totally accessible on the net sometime in the future.
We were always careful to identify the singers and storytellers who gave us the material.
I can honestly say that in all the time we worked in the field we NEVER encountered any opposition to our passing on songs and stories; any examples of this we have witnessed have been extremely rare and has come from a tiny handful of performers on the folk scene. Had it been prevelant among traditional singers we wouldn't have had a tradition to pass on. East Anglian singer Walter Pardon summed up the attitude we encountered perfectly when he told us (on record) "They're not my songs, they're everybody's".
Jim Carroll