The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #131826 Message #2984394
Posted By: Jim Carroll
11-Sep-10 - 04:13 AM
Thread Name: Child Ballads survived in oral trad.
Subject: RE: Child Ballads survived in oral trad.
"But the tradition of composing local songs found in the 20th century in Ireland is certainly not typical of England." Sorry Steve - missed a bit last night. We really don't know that this is the case. We can guess that the early collectors were only interested in the national material and would not have bothered collecting local home-made pieces. We know for certain that Lancashire mill-workers made songs (I used to have a couple of collections of them). The same with Scots miners (Joe Corrie published a few collections). There were many poets like him in Scotland (referred to somewhat rudely as 'kail yaird (cabbage-patch) poets). We have examples of those on our shelves. I've already mentioned the Agricultural Workers Union songs (Walter Pardon's The Old Man's Advice). We really don't know how these copositions sat within the tradition, we do know they existed. All this just underlines how little we really know about the song tradition; certainly not enough to make sweeping definitive statements The desire to record experiences and emotions in verse seemed at one time to go with the territory of being a human being - I refuse to write that off as just being a commercial enterprise. Jim Carroll