My method of dealing with the folk police is to point out to them that I am not in their jurisdiction.

Although I am what is generically referred to as a "folk singer" because I sing folk songs to the accompaniment of a guitar, I do not consider myself to be a folk singer. I was born in a big city and raised in another big city. My parents weren't farmers or miners or seafarers (although my father loved fishing—for sport), they were health professionals. And neither of them were musicians, although my mother took some piano lessons when she was a girl.

My musical background came initially from listen to the radio: classical, pop, Broadway show tunes, etc. The first folk songs I recall hearing were one Sunday afternoon on a radio program hosted by Burl Ives, where he gave the history of the Erie Canal in song and story. I also recall hearing the records of Susan Reed and Richard Dyer-Bennet. I began actively participating when a girl I was going with in 1952 inherited her grandmother's old parlor guitar, picked up a book of folk songs, and started teaching herself. Since then, I've taken voice lessons, classic guitar lessons, studied music theory, took every course my local university English department offered relating to folk songs and balladry, and read widely on the subject.

I learned songs from records and CDs and from a large library of song books such as One Hundred English Folk Songs by Cecil J. Sharp and Folk Songs of North America by Alan Lomax, occasionally learning a song from a live person (who undoubtedly learned it from sources similar to mine). I have performed professionally, doing recitals, concerts, television, coffeehouses, and folk festivals. Now, I sing because I enjoy it (but I will accept pay if offered).

I am not above changing a word or two in a song if I think it sings better that way, and sometimes I will take two or more versions of a song and meld them, taking what I consider to be the best bits from each, possibly rewriting a little to make the result both historically and poetically consistent. I do this rarely and carefully, and, I hope, knowledgeably, but even so, in some circles, of course, this is regarded as a hanging offense. But I subscribe to the principles laid down by Rolf Cahn:

The most ticklish question still results from that awful word "Folk Music", which gives the erroneous impression that there is one body of music with one standard texture, dynamic, and history. Actually, the term today covers areas that are only connected in the subtlest terms of general feeling and experience. A United States cowboy song has less connection with a bloody Zulu tale than it has to "Western Pop" music; a lowdown blues fits less with Dutch South African melody than with George Gershwin.

Most of us agree in feeling as to our general boundaries, but more and more we search for our own particular contributions as musicians within these variegated provinces. There doesn't seem to be much point in imitating—what, after all, is the point of doing Little Moses exactly like the Carter Family? Yet it seems vital to convey the massive, punching instrumentals and the tense driving, almost hypnotic voice of the Carter Family performances.

One the one hand, there is the danger of becoming a musical stamp collector; on the other, the equal danger of leaving behind the language, texture, and rhythm that made the music worthy of our devotion in the first place. So we have arrived at a point where in each case we try to determine those elements which make a particular piece of music meaningful to us, and to build the performance through these elements. By continuing to learn everything possible of the art form—techniques, textures, rhythms, cultural implications and conventions, we hope to mature constantly in our individual understanding and creativity in this music.

I don't see that calling oneself a "folk singer" endows one with any special knowledge, privilege, panache, or general saintliness. I suspect that the vast majority of those who do call themselves folk singers have a background quite similar to my own, and can lay no more claim to "ownership" or "custodianship" of these songs than I can.

I don't just sing folk songs. I reserve the right to sing any song I that appeals to me—pop songs, Broadway show tunes, operatic arias, even rack & ruin rock & roll, and, of course, folk songs—in any way that my knowledge and my taste tell me to sing it. It happens that the songs I like to sing the most are folk songs. To a folk policeperson trying to lay an arm on me, I say, "I'm not a folk singer, I am a singer-guitarist. Therefore, I'm not even in your jurisdiction. Furthermore, since you were not raised in the oral tradition either and learned these songs the same way I did, you are not in the jurisdiction you seem to think you are, nor do you have the authority you seem to think you have. So shuddup and siddown!"

Don Firth

I do, however, try to have sufficient taste and sense to appropriateness not to sing a Scottish border ballad at a chantey-sing, or try to bung an Appalachian love song into a Robert Burns festival. You have to use your head.