How much Folk Music is there?

Subject: How much Folk Music is there?
From: autolycus
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 02:50 PM

This thread is not designed to give anybody a headache, heart attack or spend years with a computer !!

I have some idea how much art music there is from music reference books, ditto with jazz.

But not much idea of the quantity of folk there is, the v.v.v.approx. proportion of it that has been published, ditto that has been recorded.

i'm thinking of anon. folk, as composed will be at least copyrighted, if not published. Presumably.

Is there still being stuff freshly collected?



    Ivor

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 02:55 PM

This would be kind of like trying to determine how many hairs there are on a particular cat, wouldn't it?

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 03:15 PM

there's not much......in fact send me a tenner - supplies are limited; and its on a first come, first served basis; and I didn't put your name on the list; though that can be remedied if you rush your tenner to me........

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Bill D
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 03:15 PM

If it's really, really, really folk, how could you do a survey?

There's not much really 'undiscovered' folk anymore, as the temptation to be at least partly commercial is too obvious.

But...there's enough to keep you busy.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: nutty
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 03:33 PM

If it's undiscovered, you will never know how much there is until you find it.
But - yes - source singers are still being found and material collected simply because time is passing.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: nutty
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 03:38 PM

to continue - material that would have been considered contemporary by anyone collecting at the tine of the revival is now at last 50 years older.
Songs originating in he Music Halls are now an established part of Folk Collections and University and private collections of sheet music and broadsides are becoming more broadly available.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: greg stephens
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 04:06 PM

Well, it depends what you mean by folk, obviously......

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Azizi
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 04:17 PM

Hello, Ivor!

You asked is anon folk music still being composed & collected.

I guess it depends on your meaning of "folk music."

:o)

Here's my list, since I consider these to be sub-categories of folk music:

1. children's handclap rhymes and other types of children's movement rhymes

2. children's cheerleader cheers

3. children's taunts, including teacher taaunts that are parodies of Christmas songs & other familiar songs

4. other popular songs parodies {children's and adults} as long as those parodies have no known composers

5. university fraternity & sorority chants

6. military cadences and other forms of adult cadences

7. football songs/chants {UK}


Best wishes,

Azizi

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Azizi
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 04:19 PM

greg stephens, I hadn't read your post before sending mine.

Great minds and all that jazz...

:o}}

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST,Don Firth
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 05:02 PM

A pretty fair potful, I think one could say. I have a bookcase about five feet tall and four feet wide, with four shelves. This contains collections like four books by the Lomaxes, one by Carl Sandburg, two volumes of Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs in the Southern Appalachians, books of ballad collections and scholarly analysis by MacEdward Leach and several others, and on and on, books of sea chanteys and (genuine) cowboy songs. A thick book containing a batch of whaling songs. I also have things like The Joan Baez Song Book, The Coffeehouse Songbook, The New Song Fest, two song books by Richard Dyer-Bennet, and many, many more, including Rise Up Singing, and The Folk Singer's Word Book. Paperback collections I picked up in the 50s and early 60s. The stuff I keep in this bookcase has slopped over into others. I also have a filing cabinet full of song folios (saddle-stapled, containing anywhere from 20 to 50 songs each). This doesn't mention a four-foot stack of vinyl records and an equally high stack of CDs. I have no idea how many miles of tape (cassettes and open-reel) I have.

My cache of material is dinky compared to some I've seen. Granted, there is a lot of duplication, but that's still one helluva lot of songs!

And this is almost totally made up of British (English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh) and American folk songs and ballads. I do have Theodore Bikel's song book and a few others with songs of other countries, but not a whole lot. There is a whole galaxy of world folk music out there that I haven't even touched.

In the 55+ years I've been learning and singing songs, I've developed a pretty big repertoire. But the songs I have in my head are only a fraction of the songs I could lay hands on by going to the bookcase or the filing cabinet. And keeping my ears open, I'm always hearing new stuff—traditional stuff—that I haven't heard before.

I'm not worried about running out any time soon. . . .

Don Firth

P. S. I think we're gonna run out of breathable oxygen and drinkable water before we run out of folk music.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: greg stephens
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 05:21 PM

MS and printed sources for Englisdh fiddle tunes run to considerably more than ten thousand tunes(just how many I am sure nobody knows). That's just the tunes that got written down. And then there are the songs. And England's one tiny country in a big world. No, I don't thinkl stock will be ruinning low for a while yet.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: autolycus
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 05:53 PM

Thanks everyone so much. I do appreciate your posts.

Greg, that's the kind of thing I had in mind, that 10,000, tho' there doesn't sound like there's a 'master-list'

As I didn't make clear, my definition was 'anonymous',and because of copyright, i doubted that anon folk-music was still being written. I'm ill-informed, so don't know.

Is there a vast list (or lists) anywhere of known folk-songs for any period or area,as the Uni. of Melbourne Music Library has quite a big one for popular songs?

It is a slightly idle inquity,(oh,that's a good one, should say 'inquiry' -[if you think this is iniquitous, i wouldn't blame you]); just that a part of me wants to get a sort of theoretical control over a vast field.

The New Grove does it for classical; the rough Guides for folk and world musiv performers.

The folk field just seemed more amorphous.



    Ivor

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Folkiedave
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 06:01 PM

I specialise in selling books about folklore, folklife and folk music.

I have about six hundred in stock and have probably sold three times that amount in the past few years. There are a few duplicates (Bronson, Child) but not many.

Dave

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Amos
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 06:34 PM

There was actually a PhD thesis done on the question of how much folk music there is. Although it was controversial, they finally came up with a satisfactory algorithm and an analysis.

The answer is 392 billion, 178 million, 16, 289 plus or minus 1.5%.


A

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Folkiedave
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 06:36 PM

Wasn't there a rival thesis done shortly afterwards saying that the figures were wrong because the author had not provided a satisfactory definition of folk?

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 06:45 PM

look! a tenner, take it or leave it....its a bargain, signed by Cecil Sharp, certificate of authenticity from Ewan MacColl, and two polythene fingers to stick into the orifice of your choice, and a list of Albanian folk clubs where you'll be welcome, and your performance of two folksongs (duration not more than 2 minutes) will be warmly reeceived.

I do Paypal.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 06:51 PM

The bulk of known material has never been published, and remains in various archives as manuscript notation and (more recently) sound recordings. The closest you will ever get to a 'master list' of known examples of traditional song is the Roud Folk Song Index; by definition it will never be complete, but it is the single most important and comprehensive catalogue ever compiled.

See http://library.efdss.org/

Note that the Index doesn't include arrangements of traditional songs recorded by revival performers (though you can often use it to find out where they got their material from if they didn't bother to acknowledge their sources) or, for that matter, 'art song' arrangements such as those of -for example- Butterworth, Vaughan Williams, or Britten; nor recordings of those.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 07:05 PM

Interesting...but would you take these peoples estimation for a fact? I think the miners' strike taught us that ordinary people still have things to say in song. I was running a small recording studio in Nottinghamshire at the time, and people were popping in with bits and pieces they had wrote.

Maybe it won't reach the folkclubs for another hundred years. who cares...but those of us with an IQ above room temperature know that you won't kill this process (which is embedded deep in the human soul - the need to create) by wrapping it up in stupid definitions of folk music.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Kampervan
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 08:13 PM

Robb Johnson did it a bit quicker than that.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 09 Sep 07 - 08:59 PM

'autolycus' made it perfectly clear that he wasn't asking about contemporary singer-songwriter material.

A thing I make today may survive long enough to become an antique; or it may not. It doesn't start life as an antique. By the same token, a song made now isn't folk music by traditional definitions, though it may perhaps grow into that in time.

I'm not sure what 'weelittledrummer' means by 'these people', or what definitions of 'folk music' are 'stupid' from his or her point of view.

I am glad to see that he or she don't feel that trying to define things (and thus better understand them) risks 'killing' them. I agree entirely. As for the apparent non sequitur that follows, I am still baffled by the anger and hostility that WLD expresses so regularly in discussions of this sort. What is that all about?

A little more reasoned argument and a little less of the apparently crippling chip on the shoulder might not be a bad thing.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST,DJ Melton
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 12:02 AM

The answer is "Not nearly enough!"

Seriously, it goes on. Commercial music from the 20's and 30's, as well as popularly recorded folk music from all eras, is played in back bedrooms, dens, and garages and in town squares and city halls within the bluegrass tradition.

My father, who did a lot to promote bluegrass music in NE Texas, is in bed now in his final days of a sudden illness. For two weeks he has been singing lines from a Tom Paxton song, "The Last Thing on My Mind". Several lines of the melody are different, and a word here or there. Some of his friends have learned it from him, as he learned it by listening to others. In another 50 years, there will be several different versions, because this is a song that captures people's imagination and lives on in their hearts long after the guitar is set down. (And lest you think my father is being too maudlin, the other one he alternates it with is "Salty Dog!" Yea buddy!

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 02:48 AM

I think the problem is Malcolm that one senses a lot of hostility from people who can't create anything themselves, so they disguise their non creative state in a lot of waffle about a tradition - a tradition, which by and large bypasses the huge mass of the population.

The Trimdon Grange explosion and Rawtenstall Fair didn't happen yesterday, but there are things happening in the world that capture folks imagination just as much. Look at 9/11 and that song Paxton wrote about the firemen. Young soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I've heard several people at our local folk club in Derby try and express their thoughts and feelings about it in song.

Moreover when politicians get songs like The Men Behind the Wire, or Caledonia banned - I think they know damn well they're dealing with a feeling that comes from the people. Some elemental creative force we should be proud to call folk music.

I'm with the bloke whose Dad re-writes Salty Dog and Tom Paxton every week. Its an expanding universe of folk music.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST,Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 04:26 AM

WLD,
Writing a song about a 'relevant' subject doesn't make it folk - folk is a process not a type.
It's the passing on and adapting (deliberately or otherwise) that gives the song its uniqueness - and a parallel thread about bloggers is going a long way toward convincing me that that is no longer happening without the aid of a cheque book.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: mattkeen
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 04:57 AM

Klang......!

(The sound of minds clamping shut)

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: autolycus
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 05:01 AM

I've been showing my ignorance because i didn't realise that people still wrote folk music without copyrighting it (as in the Nottingham example), not that existing songs continued to be re-writtem amd re-worked, both of which sounds like the folk music process in action. Which is WLD's point, I think.

Debates about boundaries and definitions rage in every field. (The philosopher hegel ran into problems when he appeared to think that his definition of 'Truth' was the correct one. Some people just don't recognise it when it stares them in the face :-) ).

Thanks for that, Malcolm, just te kind of thing I had in mind, even if it's just the English language variety. Perhaps googling is, once again, the way forward. No, no, there are experts here who might like being asked.

As a psychotherrapist, I'll avoid voicing an opinion about the psychologies of posters. Just to say that if you are passionate, you're more likely to be upset, and folk music is something to be passionate about.

Something music has in common with other musics, is that there isn't one reason for listening.


Amos's precise answer (tho' I'm really not happy with that + or - 1.5% onelittle bit), reminds me of the joke about the two people in a Hungarian chess cafe discussing the age of the Universe.

"No, no, it 3 billion years old."

At which a chess player nearby whips round and aske,

"What did you say?"

"That the Universe is 3 billion years old."

"Thank goodess,"says the chess player turning back to his game,

"For a moment, I thought you said 3 million !"



      Ivor

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: PMB
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 05:10 AM

Ethnocentric or just ethnocentric? There are other countries that have folk music, besides British Isles and the US of A. South Africa might have a wee bit, then there's Namibia on the left and Mozambique on the right, then work upwards till you reach Alifarkatoureland. If you turn right at the top, there's Asia....

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: greg stephens
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 05:23 AM

I have just been working on a mosaic project with kids, and one lad about 7 years old made up songs(and sang them) all day, as he worked.They were not very politically relevant and contained no references to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so they might not suit WLD, but I would reckon they were folk songs all right(or possibly the raw material that supplies the folk process). He was like one of those holes they find on the seabed were hot volcanic gases bubble out and nourish strange growths of bacteria.I think I may have discovered one of the secret sources of folk music. I presume there are plenty of kids like that around, so supplies of folk song for the next century should be OK.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 06:03 AM

"Writing a song about a 'relevant' subject doesn't make it folk - folk is a process not a type."

Amen to that, Jim! And the minds that I hear 'klanging' shut are those which don't want to accept this simple and elegant model. They are, in fact, those minds who have already decided what folk music is and get very upset when the model doesn't fit with their preconceptions.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Rasener
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 06:24 AM

In Lincolnshire we have the very own Brian Dawson. He collects songs but they are stored in his head and not on paper so I beleive.
I just wonder how many people we have like that, who may well take their songs with them one day.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST, Sminky
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 10:34 AM

"They are, in fact, those minds who have already decided what folk music is and get very upset when the model doesn't fit with their preconceptions."

That accusation could equally be applied to you and Jim Carroll, Shimrod.

The folk will decide what is a folk song. Not you. Keep the definitions coming though - I for one enjoy ignoring them.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Dave Tyler
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 10:35 AM

*I just wonder how many people we have like that, who may well take their songs with them one day.*

Sounds like Cecil Sharp to me.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 10:49 AM

Is there still being stuff freshly collected?

Yes.

Example: Spirituals. During slavery, according to contemporaneous accounts, a new song could spring up at the puff of a breeze, and often did. From there they passed among slaves at the plantation where created, and/or across plantations with slaves sold/traded, and/or via campmeetings, and/or in freedom via church and cultural diffusion.

Some of these thousands (millions?) of songs were lost-- discarded as newer songs burst out of day's feelings. Some were "collected" at the time via transcription (Allen). Some were passed along orally and collected later via transcription (several collectors). Some were passed along orally and then arranged for performance (Fisk, etc.)

These may or may not have been published; some were recorded and published or transcribed later (or not).

Choral arranging from ALL these sources continued, with various published versions said to be "definitive" (but they aren't).

The genre got to the opera stage, as African-American, operatically-trained performers included them in non-opera concerts (Robeson and others). Then there was Porgy and Bess.

Some of them swam into the deeper water-- Gospel. Black Gospel. Southern Gospel. Bluegrass Gospel. Other Gosepl.....


Alongside ALL of that mess going on (mess is good), some MORE original pieces (from slavery time) bubbled out of "the grandmothers'" oral tradition at various times, into more mainstream (commercial) culture. Some of them still do-- there are still "new" pieces popping out of memory with modern interpretation and perspective.

Then there's hiphop and rap.


A subgenre of Folk that defies "definitive" approaches and "the end of the material," for sure.

~Susan


~S~

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 11:15 AM

"*I just wonder how many people we have like that, who may well take their songs with them one day.*

Sounds like Cecil Sharp to me."

Would you care to elaborate, Lizzie? In what way did Cecil Sharp not record and archive the songs he collected?

Villain, you're right about Brian. Songs - and SO much more. A lovely, lovely, thoroughly self-depricating man. Someone needs to collect it all from him - the problem is, he doesn't acknowledge the value of all the wonderful things he knows!

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Bill D
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 12:00 PM

I think some 'folk' just don't LIKE extra categories....and they want everything they 'like' to fit neatly under one category.

Sure...there are nice, interesting songs written every day about subjects of concern to the 'folk'.....but we have had a name for those for a long time. They are topical songs. If they are good, popular topical songs, they may in time be passed on in ways that eventually qualify them as folk/trad.

This doesn't mean we 'folk' singers can't sing them yet....it just means they are not sorted and absorbed yet. Some of Woodie Guthrie's
songs got 'absorbed' pretty fast...as have Ewan MacColl's. But writing a song protesting about Iraq does not automatically qualify it as folk/trad.

No one is judging 'quality' per se...just noting that some songs are listed in certain categories for convenience and relevance.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: autolycus
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 12:51 PM

If only broadcasters like the Beeb took the experiences of Greg, the Villan (good luck this season), and Susan really seriously, boy would folk music programmes change.


   Ivor

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 12:52 PM

I'm sure that he can (and probably would prefer) to speak for himself, 'Sminky' but I hope that you realise that Jim Carroll is a distinguished authority on, and collector of, folk songs. I'm sure that he didn't decide what is or isn't a folk song on the basis of some airy-fairy notion that he dreamed up in the bath and then demanded that everyone else endorse.

I, on the other hand, am not particularly distinguished in any field - but I do recognise that the "folk is a process not a type" idea makes a lot of sense - certainly a lot more sense than the 'folk songs are indistinguishable from past and future pop songs' notion. Supporters of the latter notion rather remind me of enthusiasts for the paranormal who scream "closed minds!" when scientists quite reasonably point out that there is very little, if any, evidence for such phenomena.

Mind you I'm not sure why I bothered writing this as you're going to ignore it anyway ("Keep the definitions coming though - I for one enjoy ignoring them"). You appear to have a closed mind by your own admission.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST,Mad Jock
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 01:21 PM

Send me one penny for each and every song out there and I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 01:54 PM

If only broadcasters like the Beeb took the experiences of Greg, the Villan (good luck this season), and Susan really seriously, boy would folk music programmes change.

Don't be too hard on the Beeb-- share and share alike, eh? I know that as far as my particular specialties go, they'd have to focus on it pretty hard to get even a nuance of what I can finally, after 10 years of study, say in one post.

~S~

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: autolycus
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 02:45 PM

Susan, I just meant, if they did fieldwotk progs, exploring the continuing development of folk music, the progs would be pretty different, less commercial and finished.

btw, I love and cherish the beeb, and always pleased it's supported outside the UK. Just want it to keep improving,c'est tout.


Ivor

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 03:24 PM

Yes.... but they do what they do, pretty well. To trace the spirituals, for instance.... I am not sure they could do it, the way titles and tunes shift across time and genre's. When I try to do it my head spins. I'd have had to have kept track, song by song, as I discovered (heard) the connections, and instead I just learned and enjoyed the songs.... any single song sprouts its own wildly-tentacled tree, and crosses other branches, and autografts, and re-brances...... I could not go back now and reconstruct it for any individual song, and I am not sure I could have done it as I went.

[shrug] It's for having and doing, not studying, really-- that subgenre anyhow.

~S~

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Dave Tyler
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 03:28 PM

"*I just wonder how many people we have like that, who may well take their songs with them one day.*

*Sounds like Cecil Sharp to me."

Would you care to elaborate, Lizzie? In what way did Cecil Sharp not record and archive the songs he collected?*

I said that. Why not get over your obsession with Lizzie. I wasnt talking about him not recording or archiving the songs he collected. Where did you get that idea from? What I said merely related to the idea of Cecil having that thought himself.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Folkiedave
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 03:41 PM

Well you have lost me there.

Having had what thought?

How's the weather in Canada?

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: The Sandman
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 03:52 PM

Not enough
Shimrod,
Jim Carroll ,is a collector of folk songs,he is not an authority on anything,anymore than anyone else on this forum.
Many other people have collected folk songs,Peter Kennedy, Mike Yates,John Howson, Sam Richards.Mick Haywood etc
just because someone is a collector,it does not make them an authority on what is a folk song.
Jim Carroll is entitled to his opinions,his information about Walter Pardon is interesting,but he is not god.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Amos
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 04:36 PM

ANd while we're at it, how much weather IS there in Canada? More than eleven?


A

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: greg stephens
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 05:06 PM

Sminky's assertion that the "folk" decide what is and is not "folk music" doesn't really work. The folk may well decide what will or will not last, what stays unchanged, what changes, and if so into what.But they dont decide what is and is not folk. The folk apply the folk process. But since when were the folk interested in defining folk music? The concept of "folk music" is a recent bit of useful academic classification, somewhat perverted of late into new meanings, such as "songs with acoustic guitar", or "songs about Afghanistan and Iraq from a broadly liberal/left viewpoint". The "folk", as far as I know, do not sit about debating whether Seth Lakeman's latest composition is, or is not, a folk song. That is a discussion for Mudcatters and others of that ilk. We may be just plain folk, but we are not "The Folk".

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: Art Thieme
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 05:23 PM

Alas, it's always been a small pond in which we swim.

Art

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 10 Sep 07 - 05:39 PM

Cap'n,

I never claimed that Jim Carroll is God (perish the thought!). But he and Pat McKenzie have collected hundreds of folk songs over several decades and, surely, that entitles them to have some sort of view about what folk song is or isn't? Personally, I would tend to give such a view a bit more credence than the view of someone who has not collected hundreds of folk songs, or, for that matter, the view of someone who has a conceived a notion that he/she finds pleasing and now demands that everyone else uncritically endorse.

I wouldn't be surprised (or at all upset!) to find that the other people you mention have slightly, or even radically, different views from Jim and/or Pat. If any of those people chose to share their views with me I would listen with great interest and think carefully about what they have to say. I certainly would not fly into a paddy and start accusing them of having "closed minds" (even if I should happen to disagree with them)!

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: M.Ted
Date: 11 Sep 07 - 01:04 AM

When asking "How much folk music is there?" you have to keep in mind that every language has a culture associated with it, that means the more than 6,000 languages in the world each of must have a body of traditional songs and stories--

The next thing to keep in mind is that only around two thousand languages have a written form, so the songs and stories are only orally transmitted, and there is no way to transcribe them.

The last thing is that more than a quarter of the languages each have a thousand speakers or less and are dying--It is estimated that nearly 3,000 languages will be extinct within a hundred years.

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: autolycus
Date: 11 Sep 07 - 03:15 AM

Thanks, MTed, I know things like that in the same generalised vague grip on the whole field way.

Which does make it all endless, as art music is endless, ditto films, ditto.............................

And some people don't know what to do if the tv and radio sets are broken !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


    Ivor

Subject: RE: How much Folk Music is there?
From: GUEST
Date: 11 Sep 07 - 04:12 AM

"Keep the definitions coming, I enjoy ignoring them" - now there's an open mind if I ever saw one!
Cap'n - why do you insist on doing this - haven't you got enough bruises already?
I am not just a collector any more than I am just an electrician (any more than I am sure you are not just somebody trying to make a living as a singer). Pat and I set out to meet traditional singers in order to find answers to questions such as this one. Walter Pardon, Tom Lenihan (Clare) and Mikeen McCarthy (Irish Traveller) were happy to oblige and we thought their contributions worthwhile enough to pass on too others, so we made it available via the NSA and ITMA. If you would like to compare it with your own researches you are more than welcome to do so - I would be fascinated to hear your conclusions.
I don't know if there is much more to be collected. Azizi's list summed it up for me, though a couple of categories apply to the US rather than this side of the pond.
Childrens' songs certainly have proved a rich source in the past, but I am not sure how much the one-to-one nature of mobile phone texting has affected the the communal communication that once went on in the schoolyard - I hope it still goes on.
I confess I have always found football chants, while interesting as a study, usually limited to "the blues are great and the reds are crap"; ie. somewhat uninformative and unsatisfying.
Up to twenty five/thirty years ago there were still new singers and songs to be recorded, nowadays I am not sure there are. We virtually witnessed the demise of the singing tradition of the Irish Travellers (somewhere between the summer of 1973 and Easter 1975 when they all went out and bought portable televisions and stopped singing and telling stories around the fire. The pool table, juke boxes and televisions in pubs pretty much put paid to any singing that went on there. The case was the similar in rural Ireland where singing had died out in the home, where the singing mainly took place, again thanks largely to television.
Walter Pardon's family tradition died out sometime between the wars and his magnificent repertoire was the result of his own efforts in painstakingly reconstructing it.
Collector, Tom Munnelly (who died last week), as long ago as the late seventies, described his work as a race with the undertaker and in my opinion his collection of 22,000 songs makes his opinion worth heeding.
I would love to think there are more singers to be found in isolated corners of these islands, but somehow I doubt it.
What there is I believe are large relatively untapped sources in libraries, archives, lofts and garden sheds waiting to be found and made available. The Carpenter Collection, the largest collection of ballads recorded from the oral tradition is an example of one such hoard.
When we decided to assemble a local archive of songs and music here in West Clare, literally hundreds of private tapes (mainly of music) were immediately made available to us with very little effort on our part.
We discussed to some extent the passing on of material on the 'bloggers' thread. The conclusion we have reached is that it requires some time, effort, thought, but above all the generosity of those who have access to such collections.
Here in Ireland the pioneering work of people like Brendan Breathnach, Nicholas Carolan and Tom Munnelly have paved the way for people to receive government assistance and arts council grants for setting up archives and other music resources. I hope that this becomes possible in the UK, but so far there is little sign of it happening.
Jim Carroll