The folk process and songwriting

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Valmai Goodyear
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 06:03 PM

On Sunday 6th. June 2010 there is an all-day workshop on songwriting in traditional style with Mike O'Connor at the Lewes Saturday Folk Club .

On the day before, Saturday 5th. June, Mike O'Connor and Barbara Griggs lead a workshop on dance tunes from Cornish manuscript sources; Mike has studied these and published a large and splendid collection of them under the title Ilow Kernow (Lyngham House).

Mike's songwriting is distinctive and informed by the traditional music and song in which he is steeped.

Valmai (Lewes, Sussex, UK)

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 05:49 PM

Good thread. As I read it through I kept on wanting to say something about some point - and a couple of posts along and someone else had done it for me.

One sentence that leapt out at me was when Tim Leaning wrote: "I do have a habit of assuming the the person who just performed a song I never heard before had written it."   Because that's exactly what I find myself doing.

Anyone else ever have the experience of not being sure whether they changed something in a song or learnt it that way? Or for that matter, whether they wrote a song or learnt it from someone else?

I think faulty and failing memory can be a key element in the way songs get knocked into shape.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 05:10 PM

Great contributions, and thanks for the posting of Utah Phillips' comments. All I have to add is if us songwriters are writing for commercial gain we are collossal failures. At least I am. When people ask me how long I'm going to keep playing and singing, I tell them "as long as I can afford to lose money." Making money for 99% of us who are singing, playing traditional songs and writing our own songs for pleasure making money isn't even a goal. I set out not to make any money on my music and I must say, I've succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. Now, back to the process.

Having led countless songwriting workshops, I know that there are many ways in which songs are written, and each individual songwriter writes songs in several different ways. I rarely sit down and say to myself, *I think I'll write a song about..." for me, songs are a side effect of living. Most of my songs have pushed themselves out after I've had a good time, somewhere. There should be a song, How Can I Keep From Writing. I've had major portions of songs come from dreams (as have many other songwriters I know) and on occasion I even set out to write one. Some flow out of a new tune I've been picking on guitar or banjo, but the majority of my songs seem to come either when I'm driving or going for a walk. Once I wrote a song about the history of the town my mother grew up in. Because so much of what I write just emerges, it grows out of all the music that has become a part of who I am. And because most of the songs I carry inside me are from the folk tradition, the stuff I write often reflects that. There's a flip side to garbage in, garbage out. Good stuff in, good stuff out. Most of the time.

Jerry

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Bert
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 03:29 PM

Songwriters who come from a background of singing folk songs are part of the folk process. Though the songs that they write will rarely become folk songs.

And here's an example of ...the process by which new songs are created...

Well at least of how I often create songs. I was sitting in traffic one day singing Utah Phillips' song The Goodnight Loving Trail when a woman walked by which inspired this song. And of curse the first three lines of the verse pretty much follow the tune of The Goodnight Loving Trail.


She was dressed in the Sixties as she strode along
her hair freshly colored in copper and bronze
beads and sandals and a faded sarong
and I didn't catch the song she was humming

Some different drummer was marking her tune
this woman of the sun this child of the moon
just a glimpse of her face she was gone so soon
and I didn't catch the song she was humming

Why is she living in a time long gone?
why is she wearing that faded sarong?
what is she singing, what is that song?
what is the song she is humming?

Way back in the sixties did she lose her man
maybe some hippie who took off and ran
or a soldier buried in Vietnam
and was that a dirge she was humming?

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Amos
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 03:15 PM

Pete Seeger said something very assertive at the end of a video on the New York State lumberjack-fiddler Lawrence Older [1912-1982] (video here) to the effect that if you are not writing new songs germane to the struggles of the present, why you are not honoring the real tradition.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 03:01 PM

The folk process has been likened to someone throwing his socks against the wall---if they stick, they become part of the tradition.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 02:34 PM

I think, Stallion, that's why the quote from Utah Phillips above about how the well will run dry unless people keep topping it up is so pertinent.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: stallion
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 02:27 PM

I did a double take at Stringsingers last post, first post in the thread asked not to go down the path "what is folk music" I think the idea of the thread was to explore the "folk process" on new material and see how it works or doesn't work.
But since you mention it, we are not comparing like with like, one cannot compare the folk process of an illiterate society with the folk process of 2009 the whole world has moved on, we no longer have to strain to listen and try to make sense of the phonics and remember what we hear, we have everything at our fingertips amd mouses...ok mice! So whinge about the bygone age if you want but one cannot criticise, with any authority, those who are making music in this genre now, be thankful.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 02:19 PM

Hey, Stringsinger: Not all songwriters, and perhaps not even most write songs that are "conscious efforts based on a personal agenda." Personal experiences, usually, but not agendas. Forced to guess, I'd think that most sonwriters write songs because they enjoy writing songs. At least the songwriters I know. And yes, the folk process is not self-conscious. Why do you assume that all songwriters who sing in the folk idiom are consciously trying to write "folk songs?" That's not been my experience. I write songs. They have a lot of the flavor of folk music because I love folk music and have been deeply immersed in it for most of my adult life. But I never consciously try to write a "folk" song. I also don't know any folksingers who characterize themselves as traditional folksingers. I know of what I speak because I ran a folk concert series for 27 years. The few people I was able to book who I thought of as true traditional folk singers would never call themselves that. They also tended to throw in a popular song now and then, or a recently written song that wasn't a "folk song" at all. They didn't label each song as to it's authenticity before singing it. And who thinks you have to be stupid and uneducated to be a traditional folk singer? No one I know.

You must be hanging around with the wrong folks. :-)

Besides, this thread is NOT about the definition of folk music or traditional music. It's about the process by which new songs are created, and old ones changed. A folk song printed in a collection is one version of a song. There were probably a dozen others equally traditional being sung at the same time.

Finally, I love Leadbelly's music and agree that he was a prime force in folk music. That said, I think it's allright to enjoy a particular song by someone else who wasn't traditional but was having a Damn good time singing.

Jerry

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 02:05 PM

Following on from Waddon Pete's post above:

Interviewed in the Progressive in 2003, Utah Phillips said:

"Folk music isn't owned by anybody. It is owned by everybody, like the national parks, the postal system, and the school system. It's our common property. There is nobody's name on it. Nobody can make money on it. It's not copywritten.

"A song has many different versions as it is passed through the generations. But this deep well of our people's tradition loses songs at the bottom. They are irrelevant. They are forgotten. Nobody knows how to sing them. So the well is going to run dry unless people are adding songs at the top to our common treasury."

And interviewed on the Unlikely Stories website in 2005:

"Folk music (is)... part of the common consciousness. Folk music or a folk song can be the definition of a particular group of people, but it's still part of the collective consciousness. It's very seldom these days that a song enters the consciousness, loses its identity, the identity of the person that created it, and enters the consciousness anonymously. That's a laudable goal for anybody who makes songs. To have it embraced by the people and taken into their consciousness and used, changed, adapted, but where, eventually, nobody knows where it came from. I don't see many people trying to do that. I think that most of the music that's being created today is part of the properterian culture. That's why I really liked Napster. I really liked this assault on properterian culture, which turned all music loose and threw it up in the air and up for grabs. I liked that. That charmed the socks off of me."

Anarchists? Can't beat 'em!

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 01:37 PM

Hello Stringsinger,

You need to track down what Utah Phillips had to say on this very matter.

Best wishes,

Peter

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Stringsinger
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 01:12 PM

I sense a Mudcat megaphone resounding in an echo chamber.

Songwriting is a craft and the best songwriters always want to improve in the craft.

All the people mentioned above as cited as examples of what is called "folk" here are
professional entertainers or performers.

Leadbelly's recording of "Whoa Back Buck" in my opinion is infinitely superior to anything Lonnie Donnegan has done. Why? Because Leadbelly is a carrier of a folk tradition that has been vintaged by the process of background and community in the African-American folk tradition. He also is more powerful aesthetically, in my opinion.

The folk process is not self-conscious. People can write songs that are in a "folk style"
but they aren't folk songs precisely because they are conscious efforts based on a personal agenda. Traditional singers carry the songs forward as they learned them and in some cases inadvertently change them. It's an evolutionary process and it's not about scaling a large cliff in the creative process, but a distillation of that process over time with imput from a folk community. It's the other side of the cliff, a sloping hill to the top.
(Some of you might be familiar with this quote as an analogy from another source.)

So before many songwriters congratulate themselves on the fact that they write folk music,
it would be good for them to study folklore, ethnomusicology, anthropology and sociology and do their homework in songwriting. That way, there would be better songs out there.( I can qualify what I would consider a better song but no one asked me). But to claim that they are traditional folk singers to me is the height of arrogance and ignorance.

There are those from a specific folk tradition who have done their homework and have learned to appreciate why they do what they do. You don't have to be stupid and uneducated to be a traditional folk singer.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Tim Leaning
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 12:28 PM

I have had a few people sing my stuff while I have been there,I Know one or two have said they felt a bit "funny" about it .
My own feelings are embarrassment for getting a credit for the song and
gratitude that someone thinks the song worth singing.
Like you Jerry I have had someone change the words to something a little less strident than the way I feel,but we are all different and it was still a boost to me ego.
I think I would would feel accepted as a writer if I went to a place I never visited before,with no one who I knew there and heard one of mine sung.
It was great to sing one at a club and have the audience join in from the off in a very definite way as if it was an old and well known song.
Purely because Ian Swinburne had taken it on in his set and sung it around the area.
I Dont suppose I will ever make a penny at it but I have a wealth of friends and good memories and that is worth more to me.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 07:43 AM

Man, there's a lot of good stuff to respond to on here. And I'm getting ready to go out. Just a few:
SoP: Same Old Man Living At The Mill has remained fresh for me all these years, probably more than any other song. My version is like yours in that it comes from more than one source. Most of it is from a recording by Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson from one of my very favorite albums, Old Time Music At Clarence Ashley's. I picked up a couple of verses from Leatherwing Bat out of the Burl Ives Songbook.

Someone singing my songs: I've had songs I've written performed in my presence on many occasions, and I consider it a wonderful honor to hear how people have made them their own. In one instance, I even had someone write another verse to a song I'd written. Sally Rogers called me many years ago, asking where I'd learned the song Levi Kelly. She was doing it and had added a final verse. When I told her I'd written it, she was a little embarassed because she thought it was a traditional song. I had no problem with her adding a verse, but I did ask her to mention that the last verse was hers, not mine.
She had her reason for adding the verse and it made sense to her, but not to me. That was fine.

Another example of someone changing my lyrics: my friend Susan Trump, who does many songs I've written and has recorded at least four, most recently recorded May My Heart Find Rest In Thee. She does the song very differently than I do (I usually do it unaccompanied,) and I love the way she does it. Before she recorded the song She called me and said she had changed a line. The verse is:
   I take cold comfort in the ways of man
   I see no justice in this land
   I feel the anger of the un-stayed hand
   May my heart find rest in Thee
She wasn't comfortable with the line "I see no justice in this land," and sang it as "I see injustice in this land." That was fine with me. She couldn't say that she doesn't see ANY justice. It was a matter of emphasis, and how we feel at times. Certainly, there is some justice in every land. I'm not that cynical. At the same time,
saying I see injustice in this land isn't strong enough. It feels like I'm saying, "Sure there is SOME injustice in this land, but on the whole, this is a just society. It's like saying life isn't fair (although it often is) or saying, there are times when it's unfair.
Susan sings what she feels, and in the context of the song I sing what I feel. And that's the way it should be.

The list of performers who've sung songs I've written while in my presence is long, and nobody seemed uncomfortable with it. There is no need for them to. They bring something new to the song. The only exception is people who haven't taken the time to bother to learn the words and sing lines that are awkward because of that. But hey, we've all been guilty of that, me included.

One of the engines of the folk process is laziness.

Jerry

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Mr Happy
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 06:18 AM

Jerry,

Thanks for a most intriguing topic.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: GUEST,Tom Bliss
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 05:29 AM

Just endorsing Stallion's point of view from the writer's perspective. I almost never heard versions of my songs because people never sang them in my presence - but Bruce Bailley's version of The Violin (on YouTube) is fascinating - still my song but with a whole different mood and therefore interpretation, and last week a brave lass chirped up with a version of Four Foot Track at the Chemic session in Leeds. Again, still my song, but made very much her own (fitting with her own writing and guitar style) - and all the better for it. I noticed things I'd missed when I made it up (and was so engrossed I could barely play along ;-)

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: stallion
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 04:48 AM

Jerry like you I think songs are for the singing a and singer finds their own "voice", the two things I am not happy with are people who sing irish, scottish, american and english songs mimicking the accent of that country switching from one accent to the other, I think it is sad because they haven't yet found themselves, the other is someone who changes it for the sake of being different. We change songs because it is what we see and feel in a song not because we want to be different. sometimes we sing, what to all appearances, seem like a rip off of someone elses arrangement but on at least two songs we had never seen performed the way we had done them before, a case of like minds. Sticks in my craw when we get criticised for not being "true" to the writer, like it's an insult to them. It's just we can see different meanings in songs by the odd tweak and just maybe discover the subliminal message in the song, more like a puzzle that the writer has set!

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 04:21 AM

I think it's quite important when people are singing either traditional songs or songs written by others, that they resist the temptation to simply act as a human jukebox. If I listen to singer A singing a song written by singer B, I would hope singer A was bringing something of their own personality and unique vision to the song - including making changes to the words, the melody or the arrangement, if that works for them. Otherwise I might as well sit at home with a CD of singer B's original version.

I wonder if a situation sometimes arises where people feel it is disrespectful to use someone's else's music and words as a springboard for something else? To use an obvious example, there is so much deification of Bob Dylan as a lyricist, that maybe people become a bit daunted by the idea of "folk processing" his work, and instead feel as if they should just copy him verbatim?

On the other hand, I suppose some audiences want what they are already familiar with from elsewhere, rather than an alternative take...

I guess it's also about the difference between interpretations and cover versions.

Great idea for a thread, by the way, Jerry. Hope you get some good responses.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 29 Nov 09 - 03:52 AM

The only real musical traditional is people doing the sort of music they are moved to do - as they have been doing for thousands of years. Let wilful individualism be the wellspring of all cultural (and indeed folk) process; and Do What Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the law.

I sing something I call Same Old Man initially picked up from the Holy Modal Rounders on account of it being one of the most amazing melodies I'd ever heard. No two performances are ever the same, as I might use the Rounders' verses with random verses from Leatherwing Bat, Mutton Pie, The Maid and the Magpie and The Twa Corbies or whatever other verses might fit. Rarely do I perform this, it's just something I do when I'm mucking about at home, but I regard as a crucial part of my musical ID.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 28 Nov 09 - 11:17 PM

There are lots of traditions. It helps being familiar with the one you wish to write in.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 28 Nov 09 - 10:47 PM

Hey, Bert: I find that sometimes long after I've written a song I recognize where part of the melody came from. The last few notes of the last line of one of my songs are identical to Oh What A Beautiful Morning. Even weirder, last night Ruth and I went on a tour of the historic churches on the Green, here in Derby (Connecticut.) As we were leaving the Congregational Church which goes back to Colonial Times, the organist was playing a hymn I don't ever remember hearing. The melody was very close to a song I wrote about losing my reverse gear while driving in Kansas. I had to laugh, wondering if perhaps at some time I had heard the melody and it had lodged somewhere in the back of my mind, only to slip out writing a song about losing my reverse gear. Could be.

Jerry

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: GUEST,Bert
Date: 28 Nov 09 - 09:19 PM

Every song I sing I have to make my own, maybe just a different emphasis here and there or a variation in timing. But often I change words because the ones I've heard before don't seem to fit or make sense.

Then there are those songs which everybody sings differently. I don't think I've ever heard two people sing Seven Dear Old Ladies the same way.

When I write songs, my limited musical knowledge forces me to borrow a lot from existing tunes and styles. Sometimes it is blatant and deliberate as in Silicone Cindy, but other times I will have a tune in my head and it ends up in a song that I am writing. The tune for Bathing Angel is derived from The Eton Boat Song for that reason. Often by the time I get to the end of the verse I will change the tune of last line or two so that it will scan with my lyrics.

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 28 Nov 09 - 09:13 PM

That's a healthy attitude, Tim. And your right that it's often the first version you hear of a song that becomes the definitive version for you. I love Leadbelly's music but I was greatly dissappointed when I heard his recording of Whoa Back Buck. He couldn't touch Lonnie's version, for my ears.

Jerry

Subject: RE: The folk process and songwriting
From: Tim Leaning
Date: 28 Nov 09 - 08:57 PM

Not a folkie myself but do write a few.
I have noticed that even in the short time i have been trying to make music,my own renditions of my songs changes.
Also been sitting in t'pub and enjoyed joining in songs where some one has taken a song and modified it to draw a link to events,avoid giving offense or to try for a few extra laughs.
I would say that in my opinion music does get changed and altered undoubtedly.
I do have a habit of assuming the the person who just performed a song I never heard before had written it.
If they then explain that no, it was by ......
I tell them that as they were the first to play it in my universe theirs is now the definitive version for me and any other subsequent performance will be measured to some degree against that memory.
My point being that if they have not performed a cd perfect copy of the song I dont know that.
Nothing that rely s on one person observing the performance of any task or ritual,will ever be faithfully repeated. So if you then add in the second part where the observer tell what he saw to another and so on /////.
Sometimes it enhances the song,sometimes not.
The ones in the sometimes not pile probably end up being researched in a library,the others being sung in pubs.

Subject: The folk process and songwriting
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 28 Nov 09 - 08:40 PM

I keep trying to figure out how to carry on a conversation on here about the process of writing, or learning and adapting music that respects the folk tradition. I always get shanghied by endless discussions about what is folk, and what is tradition, and what is traditional. Those topics have been discussed ad nauseum on here, from my perspective, but apparently there is still a desire to argue definitions. That's not what this thread is about.

Whether you are a singer, singer-songwriter, or instrumentalist you are a part of a continuum. Folk music refuses to be locked in a cabinet. I'm not here to make a point or pontificate. I'd just like to have a conversation about how we make music... how the traditions that we love shape the music we create. There are many examples. Here is a simple one.

Olddude started a thread about a version of Blues in the Bottle that I recorded. It's touched off a lot of interesting observations about how we make music. Back in the early 60's Ed Denson sent me a real to reel tape of old-time music, which for many years was the richest source of material I've drawn from. One of the songs was Blues in the Bottle by Prince Albert Hunt. I had no idea who Ed Denson was. He wanted to get a tape to Luke Faust, and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders and someone told him to send the tape to me, because their mailing addresses were too ephemeral. Luke and I learned the song and did it together. I have a recording we did of the song at a concert in the mid 60's which is very different than the version I did on my own after Luke and I stopped performing together. In the meantime, The Holy Modal Rounders recorded their own version that didn't resemble anyone else's. Nothing the Holy Modal Rounders did resembled anything anyone else did. Part of that may have been a lack of discipline to actually learn the words from a record, but part was because they were into pyschedlia. They even sang in How Long Blues that they had Pyschedlic shoes. They changed the name of the town of Chillicothe to Silly Puddy. They just got a kick out of the sound and the idea, I guess. At the same time, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band did the song with similar lyrics to the Holy Modal Rounders, probably for similar reasons. Then the Loving Spoonfull did it, mostly with the Holy Modal Rounders changes and that started to become the standard version of Blues in the Bottle.

When I go back to Prince Albert Hunt's original recording which was the catalyst for all these versions of the same song, I was the most loyal to the original words. Even then, I didn't sing half of the verses, because I didn't like them. I sang what I liked to sing... not all that different from The Holy Modal Rounders. From my perspective all these versions are "right" because I don't believe songs are written in stone. They grow and change whether you want them to or not.

As a songwriter, I draw from the well of traditional music, but there's a lot of rhythm and blues, gospel, old country music and blues mixed in that well. Like everyone else, I can only write what I know and love. The best I can do is write what is me. Or at least a part of me. That's true of all of us.

When I learn an old folk song, like Whoa Back Buck, it becomes a mixture of several versions. Most of the verses come from Lonnie Donegan, who "learned" it from a recording of Leadbelly. Not that you could tell. I loved Donegan's wildness and over the top exuberance, but that's not who I am. I ended up adding a verse from the song as Dave Van Ronk did it, because I liked it. I didn't do it anything like Dave did.

I mention these things because I've experienced my share of crinkled noses, and "ewwwws" over the years from people who think a particular version is "right." If I sing it, it's right. If someone else sings it, it's right, too. Different but the same.

I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this topic. If I ramble, it's because I'm really interested in the way music evolves.

Jerry