"A good story does not rely on the teller for its goodness. The same for songs quality is not essential when the song or story is good."

Another glaring example of not getting the whole picture. Yes, indeed. A song or story may be very good indeed, and its quality as it exists in a book or out there in the ether may be that of an exemplary specimen. But we've all had the experience of hearing someone completely screw up a really funny joke because they can't tell a joke to save their soul! Or someone totally carve up a beautiful song because they can't sing for sour owl jowls.

The inherent quality of something as intangible as a song or story simple fails to come across unless the song is at least adequately sung and the story is told with some basic understanding of what it's about.

DO think things through, Conrad.

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In the U.K., there is a ninnyhammer who is quite similar to Conrad.

Conrad fancies himself a "visionary artist" and expresses himself by filling his yard with debris gleaned from various dumps in his vicinity. Armies of garden gnomes, and miscellaneous parts removed from department store manikins and stashed here and there. He also glues odds and ends to the hoods, roofs, trunk-lids, and sides of old automobiles and calls them "art cars."

The Bozo in the U.K. styles himself as a poet. He writes pure doggerel about his travels, the kind of stuff that a grade school kid could write if so motivated, and he plays the recorder haltingly and attempts to sing (badly off-pitch most of the time).

This Bozo also says we're doing it all wrong. You should sing only songs that are indigenous to the area in which you live. If you live in Cornwall, thou shalt not sings songs from Yorkshire. If you are Scottish, how dare you sing a song from Wales? And for that matter, no American songs either. American singers who sing songs from the British Isles should be flogged.

His advice to me—now, keep in mind that my great-grandfather came to the U. S. from Scotland (with the Hudson's Bay Company), and my grandparents on my mother's side came to the U. S. from Sweden—is that, since I am an American, I should lay aside my (Spanish) guitar. I should beat a drum and sing Native American chants.

Now, although I've heard this sort of thing on television from time to time, Native American chants are totally alien to me. And in addition to that, I once met a Native American who happens to have a degree in Anthropology. He said that although it qualifies as "ethnomusicology," and is worthy of study, he has mixed feelings about taping and listening to Indian chanting out of its natural habitat, even for study, because most of the chants are related to spiritual ceremonies of some kind, and should only be performed and heard when in the context of the related ceremonies. Otherwise, it verges on something that could be considered as "sacreligious." So out of respect for Native Americans if for no other reason, I don't see myself beating a drum and doing Native American chants.

Nevertheless, that's what this Bozo tells me I must do, otherwise I am committing the mortal sin of transgressing his concept of what is correct and what is unacceptable in the realm of folk music.

The amount of abysmal ignorance and rampart stupidity in the world is really appalling. But as to the blithering pontifications of these numbskulls, ninnyhammers, and nincompoops, let us take the advice that Virgil gave Dante as he observed the self-righteous inhabitants of the lowest level of Hell: "Let us think no more about them, but look once and pass on."

Don Firth