Dick, feel free to edit and use the following in any way.You may also find some useful things in the current Folkbabies thread. See the words of the grown-up folkbabies there.
~Susan
My husband and I live in and serve Tioga County, PA. This is a poor, sparsely-populated rural area where resources are usually in short supply unless home-made. The rates of suicide, alcoholism, illiteracy, spousal abuse, sexual assault, child abuse, child sexual abuse, and child pornography are extremely high here. Yet at the same time our communities live out the good old values of family, farmfolk, and mutual aid that were once the way of life in most of our country.
A current project I could not be doing without the Digital Tradition involves presenting and teaching one of the positive aspects of their culture-- folk music-- to boy scouts too poor to have uniforms. You see, these songs are no longer taught to our children... the porch pickers and homespun teachers are mostly past. (We are working on this as well.)
Barney, and other current cultural icons beamed into the hollows via cable TV, do not relate to life experience here. They do not sound like, look like, act like, or feel like either our problems or our values. They can neither help with our problems nor call us to our values. The Digital Tradition has provided me not only with reproducible songsheets, but historical notes on many old favorite folk songs that previous generations take for granted. These notes come alive when the young people are asked to make up their own verses to thse wonderful classics-- and thus they see that they are actually connected to what we so casually call "the folk process." They see that they are connected to something older and bigger than Real Life looks around here these days.
The project has already been described in the discussion forum that accompnaies the Digital Tradition. Thus, through ongoing discussion, projects like this can serve as a living model for others as long as the site remains open.
The Digital Tradition provides me with something else, too-- a place to contribute the songs that are still sung here, many never collected before. I post several new songs each week, many of them not available in retail songbooks. I hope one day these will be included in the Digital Tradition. There are any number of places I could post them... but I choose to support what is already more wonderful than I could have imagined.
My hope is that the Digital Tradition and all its resources will be available for a long, long time, in homes and schools. One reason this is SO important is that as music education is cut from school programs, we have fewer and fewer young people who learn to read music as they grow up. The Digital Tradition contains thousands and thousands of hearable TUNES. And for so many in this neck of the woods, real, stick-to-your heart learning still comes through HEARING.
All of this happens with the tools of today's technologies, which are also a reality even in this place and time.
The Digital Tradition must flourish and grow amid the cacophony of the Internet, if we expect to keep the voice of our people from vanishing.
Susan Hinton
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Wellsboro, PA