From 'A simple Countryman' (Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie - 'Dear Far-Voiced Veteran' Essays in Honor of Tom Munnelly, Old Kildarboy Society (2007)

The text in red are direct transcriptions of an interview with Walter in his home, now housed at The British Library


There would be conversation, music, singing and dancing at these parties but always perfect quiet for the songs. The living room had an exposed beam running across the ceiling called the baulk and the shout would go up, “Our side of the baulk” after someone had sung from one side of the room and they would take turns across the room. They each had their own particular songs for these occasions. Apparently no-one wanted THE DARK EYED SAILOR so that was Walter’s song, or sometimes WHEN THE FIELDS WERE WHITE WITH DAISIES. They all knew the tunes but everybody was very protective of their own songs and did not want others to learn them. As the favourite youngster, Walter was the only one to whom Billy Gee would give his songs but none of his contemporaries wanted them anyway; they would only learn new songs as they came out.

“There used to be Christmas night and the Harvest Frolics, yes. Well they sung the songs as they learnt as new. The ages stretched so much, you see, from the oldest down to the youngest and there was years difference, you very near knew when they were born by the songs, you see. They’d be the folk songs that went back probably to the eighteenth century, early nineteenth; then when the younger ones come along, songs would be sung what they learned perhaps in the eighteen or nineteen hundreds, up to early perhaps nineteen twenty. So they all learnt them as new, as they come out in their time. And there was only me learnt the old ones, you see, what had gone back, what grandfather sung.
The Harvest Frolics finished when I was a boy, anyhow. Then that gradually died as the old people kept dying; then the old Christmas parties finished altogether, so there was no more left to carry it on and no-one left but me who knew the songs”.

Yours are the arguments with no basis and refuse to back them up with anything resembling evidence - you have mine

"but your arguments on here about a time long ago are becoming very tiresome"
Sorry Joe; what is happening on the scene today has to be based around what the term "folk" meant to our source singers and to those of us who took up their songs and their interpretation, otherwise it is totally relevant - you mat have merely termed your thread "the scene"

Ray
If you reduce the scene to "bums on seats", again a discussion on "the folk scene becomes meaningless

"It's not proper business if it's not done in the traditional way
Yet more snideswipes Dave !

Meant to respond to this earlier
" one thing he did that was worthwhile was encourage some of the early folk-rock stuff."
Nobody suggested Bert never made mistakes
Jim