"I would perceive are matters of musical and lyrical form, "
I believe that the universal and timeless quality of folk songs accounts for their survival - once you view them as a singer you come to realise that a centuries old song can still say something about you as an individual
That is basically what MacColl and the Critics spent nearly ten years exploring and I belive it is what the singers we interviewed meant when they described their songs as "true"
Walter Pardon, Tom Lenihan and Mikeen McCarthy all described how they saw 'pictures' when they sang
As we knew Mikeen the best and the longest, we once conducted an experiment that we would never have carried out with somebody who we suspected might have become self-conscious after such an exercise
Mikeen had a mixture of songs, mainly traditional, with some early popular songs thrown in.
We got him to sing one of his traditional songs and recorded him describing what he saw - extensive and detailed, sometimes staggeringly so.
We repeated the exercise with a popular song - nothing
WE did this three times with the same result
Without actually using specific songs, we asked Walter Pardon about his pictures - he spoke at length about the pictures he saw and volunteered the information that those he described as not being 'the old folk songs' produced no such pictures
Mary Delaney had been blind from birth yet she spoke in terms of colours, sizes and hair styles - beyond me!
If talking about the songs and examining the context of song texts is not what the book is about, I'm at a loss to know why Roud calls it 'Folk Songs of England'
The greatest problem of our understanding of folk songs is that nobody ever asked the singers how they felt about then - this is led to a history of academic kite-flying
I suspect what this book is.
To ignore the basic beliefs of over a century's research by some of our greatest and most dedicated scholars is comparable to the Khmer Rouges 'return to the year zero'
Dave Harker approached his work on what amounted to personal attacks on the early collectors - Steve Gardham has described Child as an elitist and suggested he was incapable of separating his work on the ballads from that of formalal poetry
" He was Professor of English at Harvard. His previous work included a 30-vol critical edition of 'The English Poets'.Don't you think that colours some of his choices?"
Songs "being absorbed in the folk repertoire" is a meaningless term
It would mean that whatever any traditional singer who joined a local choir (as Walter's forbears did) or say, light opera society sang would automatically become a folk song.
It's the old 'singing horse' definition writ large
Jean Richie summed up beautifully how the old singers discriminated in their songs when she was collecting in Britain in the 1950s
She said (paraphrasing):
"if you asked for the old songs, you could get anything from Danny Boy tyo any of the mawkishly sentimental popular songs they had learned in their youth
Ask them if they knew 'Barbara Allen' and that's when the old folk songs songs would come pouring in".
Mary Delaney had as many Country and Western songs in her repertoire as she had traditional songs, yet she blankly refused to sing any of them
telling us "I only learned them because that's what the lads ask for down the pub".
She described all her traditional songs as "my daddy's songs" - she had dozens, when we recorded him he had six.
Their opinion has to be taken into consideration - Roud had the opportunity to include at least a a few of those opinions yet, once again - the real experts - the singers, were never consulted.
If that's not 'shoddy' than it's agenda driving.
Roud's book is of enormous interest to those who wish to lean about popular music of the past, but I fear that, taken uncritically it can do the same damage to folk song scholarship as the 'anything goes' policy has done to the club scene
It is pointless quoting the '54 definition which is largely based on Sharp's work if you have rejected the conclusions that that definition was based on
Jim Carroll