"With all due respect, Jim, you're not a historian."
With equally due respect - how the hell do you know what I am; once again you are indulging in what you accused me of earlier - putting words, opinions, and experiences in the mouth of somebody you have neither met nor talked with.
If you mean I'm not a historian by profession, you are right.
On the other hand, I have had a life-long interest in history, particularly social and oral history and am at present involved in collecting and archiving the working practices of the local fishing and farming communities in this area, much of which is to be found in the local songs.
Whatever Hibbert, Postgate, Cole, Thompson... or whoever wrote, the fact remains; if I want to know which ships, officers or commanders took part in the Battle of Trafalgar, what weaponry, tactics, whatever, was used, I would probably find it in the Naval Records. If I am very lucky, I might even be able to scratch up a little information about the origins, backgrounds and experiences of a miniscule number of the ordinary seamen who did the hand-to-hand fighting. On the other hand, if I wanted to know the feelings and experiences of the men below deck, I would find them recorded in the songs they made and sang. The same goes for the mines, the mills, the bothies, the armed forces - you name it, it's all there in the songs and quite often, in the heads of the people who sang them (you should have heard Walter Pardon talk about life on the land at the beginning of the 20th century and the re-establishing of the Agricultural Workers Union).
The idea that our history has first to be filtered through the minds of the educated before it is fit to be passed on to us proles is an arrogance that is widely peddled in our society. We really do have our own history, and the ability to articulate it.
The field singers we were lucky enough to hear, meet and record were the last in a centuries-old line of a tradition that has now disappeared; it seems to be incredibly stupid and not a little arrogant to claim that we had and still have nothing to learn from them.
"Mine were family and friends...."
If that's the case with you Paul, you are one of a small and extremely fortunate minority; most of us were outsiders whocame to the music via the clubs, the books and the recordings.
Jim Carroll