Actually, you can go back further than the Sixties.

I first got interested in folk music way back in 19 aught 52. Back then there were no more than about half a dozen of us in this area. When we said "folk music," people thought we were talking about "Country and Western." Although lots of people liked to listen to us sing our weird songs, most people thought we were kind of peculiar. Our sources for songs were pretty skimpy compared to now. There was no internet and no DigiTrad. All there was were half a dozen Burl Ives records (10" LPs), one or two apiece by Richard Dyer-Bennet, Susan Reed, Cynthia Gooding, the Weavers, Josh White, and a well-stocked record store might have a couple of Folkways records such as Pete Seeger's Darling Corey album, and maybe even a Leadbelly. The Anthology of American Folk Music came out about that time, but most record stores didn't stock it and most of us didn't even know about it. Printed sources we knew about were pretty much limited to Carl Sandburg's American Songbag, Lomax's Folk Song USA, and one or two paperbacks like The Burl Ives Song Book. Some of us dug around the public and university libraries and discovered all kinds of good stuff.

Several songs were considered "standard repertoire." Songs like Down in the Valley, On Top of Old Smoky, John Henry, Lord Randal, Barbara Allen, The Streets of Laredo, Greensleeves, Black is the Color, Venezuela, The Drunken Sailor, The Midnight Special, and a couple dozen others. Some of us who frequented the libraries discovered recordings by people liked Frank Warner and Bascomb Lamar Lunsford and even more Folkways records, plus a few field recordings. We learned songs from these to add to our "standard repertoires." Then came Harry Belafonte in the mid-Fifties, The Kingston Trio in 1958 with Tom Dooley (which I had already learned from a Frank Warner record), and then all hell broke loose. The Great Folk Scare took off.

There was a sudden outpouring from radios and juke boxes of songs that most people had never heard before. Many were traditional, but a lot of them were brand new songs written to sound like folk songs. Aspiring singers newly introduced to folk songs usually didn't bother with the older recordings, especially those scratchy old field recordings, they used Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, Peter Paul and Mary, New Christy Minstrels, and Joan Baez records as their sources. There were new songs everywhere—and a rapid turnover in songs. It wasn't long before it reached a point where if you started to sing something like Greensleeves, John Henry, Lord Randal, or (God help you!) On Top of Old Smoky, people would sit there and groan and roll their eyes. These songs had become too familiar and since there was a whole bunch of new songs coming out, these old war horses had to go. The sad result is that I rarely, if ever, hear any of these songs sung anymore. And there are hordes of relatively younger singers of folk songs who not only don't sing them, but many have never heard them—or even heard of them.

Now, I know that there are those who would say, "Well, that's just the folk process. Songs come and go." And they usually add, "but the good ones last." Well, that doesn't quite wash. Suddenly thrust into the realm of "Pop Music," folk songs and ballads that had lasted for sometimes hundreds of years were subjected to the principles that govern "popular" music. The world of Pop music deals with "disposable" songs. Once they become familiar enough have made a pile of money for somebody, they have to be tossed in the Dumpster to make room for the next batch of "hit songs," so that more records get cut and sold and more money gets made. You can't have old songs clogging up radio station turntables and record store bins. As a result, as the Sixties progressed, a lot of very good traditional songs got tossed along with the schlock stuff. If you hauled a song back out of the Dumpster and tried to sing it, the eye-rollers went to work, sighing heavily and looking bored. More often than not, these were other singers! Not only did a lot of traditional material suffer that fate, but a lot of pretty good newly written stuff went the same route. It seems to be an aspect of our "disposable" culture.

Well, I'm all for recycling! I've long thought I would like to put together a concert—and possibly a CD—entitled "Oh, NO! Not THAT again!" made up of songs like those I've listed above. These are good songs, and it's damned well time people started doing a little Dumpster-diving!

Don Firth