"I gave up in despair trying to make the same point to you a couple of days ago"
I have never said anything different Nick - what concerns me is the ignorance and indifference dominates today's revival
Unless the good clubs get together and push their line we'll be left with Bob Geldof as a role model
I've mentioned the scene as I new it, the radio programmes dedicated to folk, the magazines engaging in exchanging in debate - the shops - all gone.
If I was negative I really wouldn't bother my arse with mind-numbing debates like this - I really am not
I believe the survival of our songs and music depends on it being nurtured
"Donal O?Sullivan, for example, stated that when scholars encounter newer folk songs that they feel run contrary to the tradition they should not encourage them.2
I really could not agree more with O'Sullivan whose work I respect enormously - I would be lost without his tale index andd Handbook
He was writing at a time when there were large numbers of traditional singers still around - and he was right - but he was referring to songs from within a living tradition being ignored, not those from a revival
Our greatest discovery has been the large repertoire of songs that, I suspect were rejected by the collectors because they didn't fit the known repertoire - not the music hall pieces or parlour ballads - everybody knew what they were and where they came from
Our songs were made on the spot by farmers, labourers, fishermen.... as a reaction to something that was happening to them - they were taken into the community, sung for a time, and then forgotten.
Thankfully, some were remembered or recorded in notebooks - 140 of them were published in the nowout-of-print 'Clare Ballads in the 70s, but nobody bothered to follow up the genre at the time
I have no problem wit anything in the article, but they were all making comments on a living or recently dead tradition - not a tiny bunch of clubs that don't care to much for folk song
MacColl had the dream that one day a living tradition could be revived by a wider understanding of the old one - I share that dream
Jim Carroll