Slag (hate these **** names - seem so insulting)
"Yes Jim_C, that is, I believe the definition of "parlando". "
To a degree I think this is right, but I have always associated parlando with classical singing, which is (I believe) aimed at a musical rather than a narrative objective. I may be totally wrong about this.
I can remember having long, somewhat drunken arguments with my neighbour, a music teacher, in my bed-sit days in London. He found it difficult to accept that the objective of a piece of singing was to put across a story rather than deliver a musical performance.
The secondary nature of the tune in traditional singing was brought home to us back in the seventies, when we were recording two elderly brothers here in County Clare.
Between them they sang us about two-dozen songs; at least half of these were to the same tune. For them, the tune was there to carry the text, and any one would suffice as long as it fitted.
Both of them had learned many of their songs from the ballad sheets that were still being sold up to the mid-fifties around the fairs and markets in rural Ireland, and these came without tunes (unless you could persuade the vendor to teach you one, otherwise, you had to find your own).
"But, in 8th grade doesn't nearly everyone sing the way they talk?"
Not unless things have altered radically since my schooldays. Any singing I did at school outside the music class was in imitation of what we heard on the radio, which, more often than not came with an American accent, along with a totally alien (to us) delivery: Slim Whitman, Hank Williams, Frankie Laine, Theresa Brewer, Kay Starr..... et al. The idea that we should sing in our own (in my case Liverpool) accents would have led to us being laughed out of the schoolyard and eventually into a back-to-front jacket.
It took MacColl, Lloyd, Lomax and the rest to persuade us that we might have something important to say in our natural voices.
As far as school was concerned, I still feel guilty for my part in a younger sister coming home in tears having been called "common" by a teacher for singing a folk-song in the way I had taught her - and this was in a comprehensive school on a working-class housing estate.
We were pressurised, by the media and by the education system, to despise the way we spoke - both the accent and the tone of our speech.
Jim Carroll