"Ewan McColl used to say you should only sing what is indigenous to you. A bit rich coming from somebody with an invented past, but I digress."

Now, I have a great deal of respect for Ewan MacColl as a singer of traditional songs and ballads—whether they are "indigenous" to him or not. But—

I was born in California, lived in the city, then moved to another city in the Pacific Northwest when I was nine years old. Other than an occasional pop song sung for self-amusement while doing the dishes or something like that, my parents didn't sing much. Most of the music I heard when I was growing up came out of the radio. If I were morally limited to singing only songs "indigenous" to me, I could sing nothing but covers of songs sung by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennet and those blokes. And, perhaps, and occasional operatic aria (Italian, French, or German).

Someone here on Mudcat once tried to tell me that, since I am an American, I should not sing English or Scottish songs (which I do a lot, especially liking traditional ballads). He told me that I should limit myself to what he conceived of as "songs from your American culture." I should beat a drum and chant Native American chants!

That is NOT my culture! Far from it! I am much further removed from that culture than I am from the Scottish highlands. Especially considering that my great-grandfather came from Scotland.

Jack Campin, above, touched on an important issue. The idea of my performing Native American chants could be offensive to Native Americans because, as one Native American (who, incidentally, had a degree in Anthropology) told me, many chants are essentially spiritual in nature, and Native Americans don't even want them recorded by anthropologists or ethnomusicologists for study purposes, because if they are chanted, or for that matter played on tape out of the context of the appropriate ceremony, it would amount to what we would regard as sacrilege.

But I don't see how the same prohibition should apply to an American singing Scottish ballads—or to a Chinese Australian singing Calypso.

"The Twentieth Century Minstrel," Richard Dyer-Bennet (born in England, partly raised in Canada, and educated in Germany and California), was once given a dose of grief for singing "John Henry," the American ballad about the legendary African-American "steel-drivin' man," because he, Dyer-Bennet, was not black. Dyer-Bennet's response to this criticism was that he was not pretending to be John Henry, nor was he pretending to be black. When he sang the ballad of John Henry, he was the narrator, telling the story of John Henry. He was NOT trying to appropriate someone else's culture.

It would be a sorry world indeed if we were not permitted to sing what the spirit moves us to sing. Sing what YOU want to sing. MAKE it your own.

Good luck, and ENJOY!

Don Firth

P. S. Well, actually, my father knew two verses of "Ole Dan Tucker."