The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #166304   Message #3997347
Posted By: GUEST,Karen
22-Jun-19 - 04:02 AM
Thread Name: An Interview with Bert Lloyd
Subject: RE: An Interview with Bert Lloyd
First of all, I sing very few songs as I receive them - very few. I like to alter them around a bit, according to my fancy. Old Vaughan Williams once said to me, the practice of altering folksong is an obnoxious one and I trust nobody to do it, except myself [laughs]. I feel like that. But I do like to alter and remake songs. And, as for songs, which have remained in oblivion, partly because sometimes there doesn't exist, among all the variants, there doesn't exist a single complete one, it seems to me. If a songs going to be nicer if you splice three or four variants of it together and make the story more or less complete, so much the better. It's better than having it hang around as a ruin - a set of ruins. So, that's it, I don't feel that, in popular performance, the existing traditional model is sacrosanct