Subject: RE: homage to Rise Up Singing
From:
Don Firth
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 02:05 PM
I heartily concur with everything Bob (Deckman) Nelson says just above. And I most enthusiastically endorse his second to last paragraph, which bears re-reading.A beginner is a beginner. One step in the learning process is the building of a repertoire. This is where books are necessary. But at some point, you leave the books behind and open your ears to what's really happening out there. No two singers sing the same song ... they sing variants. And it's these subtle differences that make this world of folk music so viable and ever-changing. At the hoots (short for "hootenanny*") that are still going on—and the Seattle Song Circle initially—it was never questioned that one learn a song before trying to sing it in front of the rest of the group. This means having the words memorized, knowing the tune, and having all the guitar, banjo, or autoharp chords memorized and practiced as well. If you blow it, fine! Nobody is going to stone you or laugh at you. Keep pluggin'. Everyone had (has) fun, and a fair number of pretty good folk music performers started out tremulously but gamely trying their first song at one of these events. Then maybe a year of so later, once they have developed a repertoire, they emerge as a strong singer, sometimes going on to perform for non-folk groups.
I got started this way. And my first big break as a singer was when I was asked to do a television series on KCTS (local educational channel, now a PBS affiliate), funded by the Seattle Public Library. Jim Gilkeson, who worked for SPL in public relations and who was liaison between SPL and KCTS, was also a jazz musician who liked folk music as well, and had sat in on hoots a lot just as a listener, and that's where he had heard me. Big break indeed! After having done a television series, other offers started coming in.
What Barry said about "dumbing down" is very much to the point. If someone would like to develop his or her skills as a singer and/or instrumentalist, and develop a sufficient repertoire to perform for non-folk oriented groups, possibly do concerts, recordings, and such, then the hoot format—everybody who wants to can sing, but learn the songs and leave the books at home—is a very good, friendly, "warm plunge" way to go about it.
If one wants to get together with of bunch of other people for group singing, then fine! There's nothing wrong with that. No pressure, and no preparation required, except, perhaps owning whatever books the group uses. But the group-sing format, with everyone singing the same songs out of the same book is very unlikely to produce strong individual performers. And it may very well stifle individuality itself.
So it depends on what you, as a singer or aspiring singer, wants.
If you don't like the group singing out of a book format, don't go. Let those who enjoy it do so.
But it's a bit of reverse snobbism for those who prefer the group-sing format to accuse those people who prefer the "hoot" format, where they can sing what they want, the version they want, and in their own arrangement, of being a "clique" or implying that they're a bunch of egotistical prima donnas.
Don Firth
*And by the way, the word "hootenanny" in association with a get-together of folk musicians originated in Seattle in the late 1930s or early 1940s, and were quite different from the later "hootenannies" (after the 1963 "ABC Hootenanny" on television and the egregious movie "Hootenanny Hoot") in which there is a distinct separation of performers and audience.
See Pete Seeger's The Incompleat Folksinger, page 327.)
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