Beware -- Long-winded dissertation!!

Since the very early Fifties I've been to more hootenannies and songfests than I can count. The vast majority of these were in private homes. We would sit around in someone's living room and sing, sometimes solo, sometimes all together. Sometimes we'd follow a theme, everybody trying to come up with a mountain murder ballad or a pirate song (challenges to memory and repertoire), but usually it was whatever song happened to pop into someone's mind at the time. All spontaneous, nothing planned. On one occasion, we got going on What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor? and people started making up verses. The damned thing went on for over half an hour, and each new verse was raunchier than the last. Songs were often interspersed with jokes, quips, information about a particular song, brief (or not-so-brief) narrations, or bursts of pure silliness. Nothing stuffy, nothing structured -- lots of laughing and lots of quiet and appreciative listening. For a good fifteen years or so, these often spontaneously organized and strictly informal gatherings occurred almost every weekend. The gatherings are still going on. They just don't happen as frequently as they did back then and because we're older and have more responsibilities now, they're generally planned ahead of time. All-in-all, it's about the best way I can think of to spend an evening.

It was not uncommon for some people to gather in the kitchen and talk among themselves. It might be gossip, it might be politics, it might be swapping knock-knock jokes -- and more than one personal crisis found its way to the kitchen, with people there offering sympathy or advice. The kitchen crowd and the living-room crowd were fluid. Often someone would come out of the kitchen to listen to the singing, and someone in the living-room would set aside his or her guitar or banjo and head out into the kitchen to take a break, pick up a fresh beer, rummage through the cheese dip, and see what was going on.

Sometimes it was wall-to-wall people in the living room, nobody in the kitchen (except the cat, having its way with the cheese dip). Sometimes almost everybody was in the kitchen, with just two people in the living room, seriously and studiously comparing versions of a particular Child ballad (and sometimes yelling, "Hey, can you keep it down out there!!?").

There was a bunch of real hard-core musicians, and there were people whose interest in folk music was only casual. And all points between. People who were not at all interested in folk music either didn't come or didn't stay very long.

Were we a "clique" or an "in-group?" Well, yeah, I guess so. I suppose some people who were so inclined could accuse us of that. But most of us had known each other for a long time -- we were close friends. But any new person who walked in was welcome. A singer from out of town was always welcome. Someone who didn't play or sing but liked the music was always welcome. A beginner with a new instrument and a repertoire of two or three songs was usually treated like a new convert, with everyone offering help and advice and giving them an opportunity to try their newly-learned songs (with encouragement, no matter how inept. "Give her time. Remember when you first started."). And if a newcomer didn't know the customs of the natives, they might be admonished politely not to talk while someone is in the middle of a song or something like that, but then that's how one learns the mores of the tribe. If someone (be it newcomer or old-timer) were rude and unruly, they would probably be asked to leave. This happened rarely, but it did happen a couple of times.

The parallels are obvious.

Offhand, I can't recall ever hearing the word "dysfunctional" at any of these gatherings. If the word did apply to anyone there (and I'm quite sure that it applied to a few), it was unlikely that it had nothing to do with the rest of us.

Were we all -- the whole bunch of us -- dysfunctional? Believe me, there were a lot of people who thought so! But I can live with that.

Don Firth