I'm starting a new podcast called "What The People Sang" (http://www.whatthepeoplesang.com/). It's dedicated to sharing a love of traditional folk songs. History, background, context different versions, and recordings together give a picture of these old songs and how they've come to us through history.

The general idea is to go digging into folk songs from earlier than the 1922 "public domain" line in copyright history. Immigration songs, general folk songs, work songs, cowboy songs, etc.

Episodes would feature one or more individual songs, the history, context, different versions, etc. of those songs. I also want to include a simple recording of each song that we can release as a public domain version of these songs. That's where you come in.

While I will probably make some of these recordings myself, I'm looking for volunteer singers to help out. Volunteers would use their own computers and microphones to record simple renditions of songs from whatever resources we have on the song. In some cases, we may have dozens of existing recordings to work from. In others, old sheet music. For others, a bunch of lyrics and a fragment of a tune. At least for the time being, I'm going to limit the scope to songs in English, but may branch out to cover songs in other languages as long as compete translations are provided for listeners who don't speak that language.

If we can figure out the logistics, I'd love to figure out how to have multiple singers collaborate on some recordings, but we'll have to see where this leads. Otherwise, what I'm envisioning is planning out episodes and the songs covered, asking the group of singers for volunteers to tackle recording it, having the group pick which version(s) to include and then putting the episode together.

I'm not aiming for high production value: just real people singing these songs clearly. Obviously, the better your microphone, the better the recordings will be, but even the built-in microphones in laptops like the MacBook Pro are surprisingly good and up to the task. I do have some sample recordings of the kind of thing I'm thinking of if you're concerned that you won't be able to produce something of high enough quality and want to compare.

I'll take care of all hosting/distribution for this project, with the song recordings likely hosted on Archive.org to ensure that future generations can enjoy them for free.

I come to this as an interested amateur who loves old songs. I believe this will be a fun project for all involved and will hopefully bring these old songs to others. Obviously, if you have a deeper background in this area than I do, I'd love your help on research, etc. as well.

If you're interested as a singer or interested in contributing as a co-host, as a researcher, editor or in some other way, please drop me an email at: j@wynia.org. I look forward to working with you on this.