For the last thirty-odd years Pat Mackenzie and I have been recording traditional singers in Britain and Ireland and a large part of that has been gathering information on what they felt about the songs they sang, how they identified with them and what they menat to their various communities (rural East Anglia, the west of Ireland and the Irish Traveller community).
We have been asked to give a talk on our work by the Irish Pipers Organisation, Na Píobairí Uilleann, which can be viewed live on this coming Friday, 16th May, on their website.   
PUTTING THE BLÁS ON IT
The talk will include experts from conversations with Walter Pardon (Norfolk), Tom Lenihan (West Clare) and Irish Travellers, 'Pop's' Johnny Connors (Wexford) and Mikeen McCarthy (Kerry)
In the course of putting the together, we tried to search out information of other source singers talking about their songs, without too much success.
The two best examples we could find were from early 20th century England and from America (where the best of this type of work seems to have been done.

"Cecil Sharp had heard that a song which he had not hitherto recorded was known in an out-of-the-way corner of England. Accordingly he rushed off to secure it. On arriving at the place he was told there was only one person who knew it and this was an aged woman. On arriving at her cottage he found she had gone out to work in the fields. After much difficulty he discovered her, engaged in gathering stones off the land. The day was bleak and there was a cutting wind; when the old woman heard Cecil Sharp's enquiry, she replied that she knew the song. 'Shall I sing it to you?', she said; and raising her old weather-worn face to his, taking the lapels of his coat in her hands, and closing her eyes, she sang 'The Lark in the Morn' in her quavering yet beautiful voice, while he rapidly made notes. When the song was finished, she gazed into his eyes in a sort of ecstasy, and, in perfect detachment from herself, exclaimed, 'Isn't it lovely!"
Cecil Sharp - a biography -AH Fox Strangeways, 1933

"I have a perfect mental picture of every song I sing. I have a perfect picture of every person I learned it from, very few people I don't remember. When I sing a song, a person pops up, and it's a very beautiful story. I can see Mary Hamilton, I can see where the old Queen came down to the kitchen, can see them all gathered around, and I can hear her tell Mary Hamilton to get ready. I can see the whole story, I can see them as they pass through the gate, I can see the ladies looking over their casements, I can see her when she goes up the Parliament steps, and I can see her when she goes to the gallows. I can hear her last words, and I can see all, just the most beautiful picture."
Texas Gladden, Virginia 1941

There has been some excellent work published on the background of the singers; John Maguire (Fermanagh), Eddie Butcher (Derry) Jeannie Robertson (Aberdeenshire), Tom Lenihan (Clare), and a number of excellent books on the singing traditions and lore of one community in Fermanagh, by American, Henry Glassie. And of course, the two excellent autobiographical accounts of Perthshire Travelling life by Betsey Whyte, but these include hardly anything on the songs themselves from the point of view of the singers.
It seems to me to be a huge black hole in our understanding of the song traditions – I wonder if we've been looking in the wrong places
I'd quite like to compile a list of reference to such information and would appreciate anything anybody would like to pass on.
Jim Carroll.