English Folk - Peasants to Professors

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:41 AM

"When are the moderators going to censure this vile witch hunt, or have they too joined the baying mob, mindless with blood-lust? Shame on the bloody lot of you."

Thank you for your kind support, SP, but I'm pleased the mods let these posts stand, and that they give me the freedom of speech to respond to them. Mudcat is the ONLY place that allows that to happen and I have a lot of respect for them for doing that.

If you read the fRoots board, it drives the Moaning Minnies half mad with fury that freedom of speech is permitted over here, because it stops them from being able to show only one side.

Ruth, you weren't even on the BBC board when I first posted, so with due respect, you have no idea what happened. There was no adulation involved, never has been, just a strong desire to right a wrong.

That wrong HAS now been righted, by Phil himself, because you've all taken Show of Hands to your hearts...and that's so warming to see.

Ahhh...'Mary' :0)

OK, coach to catch!

---

This thread is closed. The rules say "no personal attacks. Mick and I agree that this bullying is way out of control. If you want to post at Mudcat, be civil.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Mary Brennan
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:33 AM

What RA said!

Lizzie wasn't banned because she likes Show of Hands.

Even Phil Beer has said that he doesn't know her and would like her to stop writing about them in the way that she does.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:31 AM

Why get out there and see what you could actually be doing that's positive and constructive for your community, or for the music you purport to love so much?

And some time ago you suggested doing a radio show. Perfect for what Joanie says. Why not approach your nearest community radio station? See if you can offer them a folk programme.

Phonic Radio here doesn't seem to have a specialist folk show. Or perhaps you could have an input into their roots and shoots show.

Lots of people could then help you taking this music out to the community.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:30 AM

When are the moderators going to censure this vile witch hunt, or have they too joined the baying mob, mindless with blood-lust? Shame on the bloody lot of you.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:27 AM

"I'd posted about a band 'they' loathed, and from that moment on, things were never quite the same."

Can we abolish this fiction once and for all? It was NEVER abvout the bands you chose to write about, it was in the incessant, over-the-top way you wrote about them and insisted on shoving your personal tastes down other people's throats. It was not a response to the music as such; it was a response to your fawning adulation which, as many people have said, often served only to polarise people's opinions, as they got heartily sick of having the same few names shoved incessantly down their throats.

Of course, to acknowledge this you would also have to acknowledge that, actually, the problem might lie with you. I won't hold my breath.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:25 AM

Gawd, folkiedave...are you related to 'folkygrim' on the BBC? You know, that guy who used to turn up and rant at me about the most purile things..over and over and over...Hardly ever showed up on there unless I was there..You write in such a similar way...IMO, of course. :0)

Humble?

Why do you have to apologise for having an opinion?

LOVE your opinions, even if others don't. They're what makes you, you.

And now, I gotta go out for the day, so I'll leave you all to rant and rage.

I'm off on a Peasant's Charabang Day Out to Torquay. (No Professors Allowed!) :0)

Didn't we 'ave a luvverly day...... ;0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:18 AM

"There is no rhyme or reason to what happened in that thread."

Oh, I think there is. Eliza had made her feelings about your recent behaviour very clear after your repeated and wholesale attacks on EFDSS and your completely misguided disparaging of Walter Pardon. As had Phil Beer, of course, and Steve Knightley, though less directly than the others. Eliza has made it clear that she does not desire your "support", and she certainly doesn't need it; people who like and respect her work were, I think, simply trying to divert you. Why? Because when you zone in and fixate on an artist, the nature and result of your attention can be both scary and ultimately damaging. Simples.

David eG makes some very salient points: he's clearly one of the good guys on every level, getting out there and giving his time to make a difference, both to society and to the music. But I guess you'll now take one flippant off-the-cuff remark and use it to browbeat and undermine him with whenever you get the opportunity - it's ever so predictable.

Tellya what. How bout, instead of writing screechy reams of hysteria at and about him from now on, you take a leaf out of his book? Why get out there and see what you could actually be doing that's positive and constructive for your community, or for the music you purport to love so much?

Or why not learn an instrument? I'm off to my melodeon lesson now, as it happens. It's a good way to engage with the music. Go to sessions. Learn some songs. Be a part of the music, not just a passive consumer. Because then you might begin to understand what it's really about - and that's NOT squeeing like a deranged teenager over "celebrities".

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:13 AM

It wasn't me who brought in the scenario that Dave (el gnomo) did, and if he's not squirming, he should be, believe me....because there is a line you don't cross...he crossed it as far as I'm concerned.
The excellent news this morning is that he'll be able to keep his eliza cds now...which will cheer him up no end.

Yup, it seems that I do get some people's backs up. I did from the very first message I ever posted on the BBC. And it stunned me, because there was nothing in it that should have made folks feel that way. I was simply a new poster, first time ever writing anything on the computer, but, without me realising it, I'd posted about a band 'they' loathed, and from that moment on, things were never quite the same.

Five years down the line, those who once shouted out so angrily against Show of Hands have finally accepted them, said openly how much they've gone up in their estimation. Of course, I realise that 'intelligent' folks such as these would only say that about Show of Hands music, and would not have the hypocrisy in their souls to merely now support them purely because Phil asked me to stop talking about the band in 'adulatory' terms, for that would be to make out that the Moaning Minnies were even bigger hypocrites than I had thought them to be....

Whoa! Far be it from me to suggest that one!

I think it's wonderful that they now love the same music I love...and I look forward to reading their words about some Show of Hands songs in the near future.

Who'd a thought it, huh?

Everything turns out sunny in the end. :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: tijuanatime
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:13 AM

>>But it doesn't excuse you from making statements that have no evidence behind them<<


"As I(without corroboration) roved out one bright(imho) May(although I can't prove it) morning(I wasn't wearing a watch)"

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Barry Finn
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 04:12 AM

"Hey, we don't have a 'disorder' though. We're just us. :0) And as can be seen from some of the lyrics of your songs which you've posted from time to time, pretty darn creative too."


Thanks Lizzie, hopefully this summer you'll be able to hear them in person

Barry

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 03:59 AM

Again, imo, the English folk world has a great deal to learn from the US, and others.

And that Lizzie is an opinion you are perfectly entitled to.

It is when you miss those three little letters out you get into trouble.Try putting it in more often - indeed try IMHO (in my humble opinion).

But it doesn't excuse you from making statements that have no evidence behind them.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 03:52 AM

in this campaign to silence me, to make ALL artists terrified of me, and to humiliate me on every board I ever visit.

Someone who gets the same negative reactions in a lot of different places may be the victim of a conspiracy against them personally. Or they may just act in a way that consistently gets people's backs up.

"I'll leave that with you." ((c) Nick Hewer)

well, you've tried to squirm you way out of a difficult situation

I don't think Dave is the one who's squirming.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 03:51 AM

Hey, Dave (folkiedave that is, please see my post above this...

Why *is* the English folk world so serious and so darn humourless? It's always puzzled me...You can see it back on Folk Britannia, it's been there for decades..A great shame...it could be so very different...

Hey ho..

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 03:47 AM

Thanks, Barry.

Hey, we don't have a 'disorder' though. We're just us. :0) And as can be seen from some of the lyrics of your songs which you've posted from time to time, pretty darn creative too.


Yes, Americans (Canadians and Australians too) *have* been brought up a few times in this thread, for being, in my opinion, far more accepting, far more laid back, far more welcoming.

Again, imo, the English folk world has a great deal to learn from the US, and others..

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 03:39 AM

Lizzie, there aren't any "Professors". It is a term you made up. Can you not realise that when you make things up it means you have made things up? Don't start dealing with these words as if other people use them and mean them in the same way as you do - which is anyway you choose.

However Eliza, bless her heart - for she must be a very busy woman - has joined on the debate.

From Lizzie - "Oh poo...Eliza luvs me really".

Subject: RE: Eliza Carthy - 'My Music'
From: GUEST,eliza c - PM
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:05 PM

no i don't. sorry. i think, after years of observation, that you're a moron.
e

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Barry Finn
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 03:36 AM

As an American (we've been brought up now a number of times in this thread) Lizzie, I encourage you to check out these threads;
ADHD/ADD and http://www.healthyplace.com/adhd/parent-advocate/dyslexia-what-is-it/menu-id-916/
I not trying to insult you by posting these. My brother is dyslexic & I myself am ADHD along with my older brother, my nephew, my mother & my son. These disorders are also often known to be umbrellas that other disorders seek shelter under & sometimes seldom are ever realized. We are also sometimes known to be very "superfocused" when otherwised scattered.

Good luck

Barry

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 02:47 AM

Nope....I didn't *write* about Eliza, merely pointed people to the documentary about her music and introduced a few videos of hers. Please read the thread. If you can find vast amounts I've written about Eliza elsewhere, or Bellowhead, please feel free to post them here.

And if those few words have allegedly put you off Eliza's music, well, she's far better off without you, isn't she, rather than having someone so vacuous appreciating her music. Yeesh!

And by the way, if you want to know *why* I don't write volumes about them, it's because they are within the 'inner circle' of the Professors, and...as you'll see from Eliza's thread, if anyone the Professors deem unfit and unworthy of talking about them, DARES to do just that, even in the most minor of ways, all hell breaks loose, and they do all they can to drive folks away.

There is no rhyme or reason to what happened in that thread. A total outpouring of nastiness over what????? Why??? You tell me, Dave. You explain to me what happened in that thread, because I've not a clue.

As to your other comments, please don't twist what I said. YOU were the one who said that my words about those artists had put you off them, which is the biggest load of whatsit I ever did hear, particularly as 2 out of the 3 you mentioned I do NOT even write about.

What is shows, is that you are happy to bring any artists into this battle to get at me. How it works is that you make any artist feel that if I dare to write about them, dare to love their music, then their career is virtually over, because people like you will go out of your way to ensure that they are laughed at on boards like these.
It's clever. It's been going on for years...and I know it works, because some artists have brought their music to me, wanting me to write about it, whilst being shite scared that they'll also be the next on the list of musical victims to be made fun of, in this campaign to silence me, to make ALL artists terrified of me, and to humiliate me on every board I ever visit.

Sadly, this time, it backfired badly against you, and it's plain for all to see how this 'system' is meant to work....but doesn't.

There ARE artists who've been given such a hard time by The Professors, that they DO run scared. I have no respect for folks like that. If jumping into bed with the traddies means more than the believing in the absolute beauty of their music, well, that to me, shows just how deeply controlling the English Folk World has become, has ALWAYS been, ruled over by a small group of humourless, dictactorial people, who seek nothing more than to control ALL artists within 'their' world...and they will stop at NOTHING to ensure that control remains as deep as possible.

As to your comments above on those less fortunate than ourselves...well, you've tried to squirm you way out of a difficult situation. To be honest, reading what you've just said above makes it even harder for me to comprehend the viciousness of your original words, because *anyone* who would ever dare to use such a comparison, is, in my book, beyond belief. But to use such a comparison, to score a cheap and dirty point, when you apparently work alongside those very souls who struggle so hard in a world that doesn't care...well...?????????


And on that note, I'll leave you to your words.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 09:22 PM

I am actualy quite involved with the 'shambling, smelly' ones, Lizzie - In a volunteer day centre in Salford. What do you do? Laugh with them? Feed them? Talk to them like real people? Or is it beyond your dyslexic reasoning to actualy do something worthwhile? They need your pity like they need a hole in the head.

Also, you have no idea in any way shape or form what my music collection comprises of, yet you have the audacity to hint that I have limited my collection in some way. I think you may be very surprised to find offerings from some of the artists you wax lyrical over alongside Martin Carthy, New Model Army, The Cure and Franz Ferdinand.

I don't just listen though. Like with the disadvantaged, I actualy do something. I have run a sucessful club and festival for 25 years. I sing, play multiple instruments, work full time (on shifts which is why I am still here at 2:15am!), have 5 kids, 4 of which have honours degrees and all of whom have survived the educational system and still find time to know the difference between enthusiasm and complete twaddle!


I suppose though that someone who starts the thread Eliza Carthy - 'My Music' only 4 or so days ago and then follows up with the comment And as for Bellowhead and Eliza, I never write about them, so you must have read the words of someone else cannot be expected to understand any of that...

Now please go away and tilt at windmills elsewhere.

Thank you.

DeG

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Richd
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:21 PM

ahhh..Doris. Now there's a name. A happy medium. All this is a lot easier if you think of it as a cosmic sort of thing. Communications from another world. A diversion. An entertainment to bring pleasure. A rest from the cares of the day. An exchange of pleasantries between people who may or may not exist in the identities they claim on line. We love the messages from the long dead, and shout at each other while the songs whisper in the dark. We all love the songs. Who cares about the singers? The songs abide. A happy medium. Yib Yib.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:17 PM

"I used to think that Lizzie was mostly harmless. You know, like one of them shambling, smelly people that wander through the streets of any metropolis and occasionaly shout nonsense that makes people laugh with a vague feeling of discomfort."

That has to be one of the sickest comments I've ever seen. Not about me, but about people who are utterly alone, so often desperate, and time and again ignored by people who should be offering them help.

And you think they're just a joke?   You think they're there for you to make fun of????????????????


And as for Bellowhead and Eliza, I never write about them, so you must have read the words of someone else, and thus, thrown your CDs away for no reason...and yeah right, like you soooo had them in the first place.

Yeesh!

AND...you're way too late about 'she damages artists' etc..because Diane's been doing that show for the last 5 years....so please, keep up and find your own set of insults to throw!

By the way, please don't worry about Show of Hands...they don't need your support, or mine...

Now I'll leave you to get back to your book of 'The Loving, Tolerant World of English Folk Music'

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:49 PM

Oh, and in case the dyslexia cuts in and anyone thinks that I was just writing beutiful smells or whatever it is.

I, like a few others I know, used to quite like Show of Hands, Bellowhead, Eliza Carthy and a plethora of others. Now we have to carry their CDs out of the shop in plain brown wrappers and will not be seen within a mile of their concerts for fear of guilt by association!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:43 PM

I used to think that Lizzie was mostly harmless. You know, like one of them shambling, smelly people that wander through the streets of any metropolis and occasionaly shout nonsense that makes people laugh with a vague feeling of discomfort.

Just to show I am not set in my ways or too old to learn I am quite happy announce that I have changed have changed my mind.

Just like a more infamous Lizzie, I don't think anything will ever be proven but the hatchet jobs she has done on the careers of those she purports to love makes me wonder what they have done to deserve such terrible retribution...

:D (eG)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:14 PM

Wasn't that Doris Stokes richd? Actually the post modernist thing might have legs - Folk means Foucault: shanty town and the fin de siecle or perhaps Folk, beyond the irony curtain by J. Derrida or even Folkie's Pendulum, and the death of the modern by Almost Everyone.

"I think Gg has shot himself in the foot in the depth of his pretension."
Don't worry Pugwash, I know the whiff of horseshit and tuppence coloured gurus when when I smell them.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,richd
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 06:49 PM

That's the happy medium comrade!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 06:40 PM

professor or peasant., rather than to be able to both at different times.

Of course the trick is to be both at the same time.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,richd
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 06:21 PM

It's interesting that several of the discussions going on here are about authenticity and authorship- both of great concern to post-modern theory. Also interesting that this discussion is put in terms that imply that people have to choose one or the other- professor or peasant., rather than to be able to both at different times. Myself, I'm a professor in the day and a peasant in the evening. Other people I know prefer it the other way round. At the moment I'm Kinda slipping towards the happy medium.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:32 PM

And she can type lying down. That confirms it really I suppose!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:30 PM

in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself.

You know Richard you might have something there. Do you think it could apply to Lizzie as well? I have often thought of her as post-modern and that seems to confirm it!!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Banjiman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:30 PM

Is he the only one? LoL

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:26 PM

In the light of Gg's apparent wish to construct a postmodernist critique of folk song, I think I should direct readers to the basic wikipedia article on it: -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

I am most taken by two quotes: -

first "of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms"

but second "postmodernism refers to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality,[4] in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself. It has given rise to charges of fraudulence"


I think Gg has shot himself in the foot in the depth of his pretension.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:10 PM

Oh, is that what "postmodernist" means?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:10 PM

Lizzie, you do really know how to make them dance...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:02 PM

See - I do my best to help people and it is thrown back in my face.

Hurumph........

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:53 PM

"Contact me and I will give you a list of my charges"

Good job I didn't say that..else you'd have called me a Trollop.

Oh, I can type lying down, no worries. :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:46 PM

If your head is aching it might be best if you go and lie down.

And whatever you do - don't do typing. It will only make it worse.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:45 PM

Is this the folkiedave theory of critical validation based on how much you can flog a book for?

Ungrateful wretch. I offer you a heavy book for half the price it is available elsewhere post free and you whinge. Last time. I am fussy about the people I sell books to.

I have a first edition of A Shropshire Lad. Is it folk? Is it feck BTW

Well spotted - it is in fact poetry. But it is about Joy and Beauty and Love and Simplicity. Try interesting Lizzie, she is into that sort of thing. Of course all that stuff is really symnbolic and allegorical you know. And the significance of the number 63? I'll let you decide on that one......

what's it worth?

You want me to value it for you? I can do this - but I have to warn you it is a skilled job and I do charge. Contact me and I will give you a list of my charges. Alternatively you could see how much people are charging via ABE. That comes a lot cheaper.

And does it make Housman a good poet?

Does the book make Housman a good poet? Well a lot of people seem to think so. After all it has been in print continuously since 1896.

But if you aren't sure why did you buy the book? Because it was a first edition and cost £0.20p? I'll buy it off you for that price.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:24 PM

I'd be extremely interested in a post modern theory of folk music if there's one available.

There are a number available but as you aren't a post-mdernist I can't sell them to you. Damn they were really inexpensive too. No market you see.

the role of the songwriter in folk. Could have done you a couple of those as well, but anthropological and about attribution. Sorry you didn't want stuff like that earlier.

re-appraising the craft of Bert Lloyd There was a short radio piece by Martin Carthy for Bert's Centenary. I might be able to help you there. Likely to be expensive because of copywrite issues. But ask. I might be able to fix up a transcript.

if you have a psychoanalytic reading the folk revivalist I'm all ears.

Remarkably I know someone who is doing just such a book - AND is looking for a likely subject. But she is looking for someone who has a brain as well - sorry - but being all ears you don't qualify.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:18 PM

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....I is soooooooo confoooosed! My head is aching!

Songs. Beauty. Joy. Simplicity.

Thank Lordy I is a peasant.... ;0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Goose Gander
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:12 PM

"I'd be extremely interested in a post modern theory of folk music if there's one available" - Do you really want the postmodernists to do to folk/traditional music what they did to literature?

For gender, see the Dugaw book.

"psychoanalytic reading the folk revival"? - If this exists, I'll read it for a laugh. After all, sometimes a banjar is just a banjo.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Goose Gander
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:00 PM

"I'm not a post modernist but it sounds like a cat among stool pigeons."

If you could translate this statement, I'd be willing to attempt a response.

But if you mean you're more interested in (for example) the "social construction of 'irish-ness' among Irish-American professionals in the midwest" rather than (for example) Irish-American fiddle music in the midwest than I'm afraid we're not going to see eye to eye on much of anything.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:46 PM

I'd be extremely interested in a post modern theory of folk music if there's one available. I'm not a post modernist but it sounds like a cat among stool pigeons. Or the role of the songwriter in folk, re-appraising the craft of Bert Lloyd, something on gender and if you have a psychoanalytic reading the folk revivalist I'm all ears.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Goose Gander
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:46 PM

Here's a few more:

Cohen, Norm / Long Steel Rail

Dugaw, Diane / Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850

Gammon, Vic / Desire, Drink, and Death in English Folk and Vernacular Song, 1600-1900

Green, Archie / Only A Miner; plus other books on folk arts, labor culture, etc. and dozens of essays published throughout his career.

Van Der Merwe / Origins of the Popular Style

Whisnant, David / All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:45 PM

a friend of mine picked up a used copy of the Penguin Book of Folk Songs (one of the compilers is, of course, A.L.Lloyd)Is it folk....?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:36 PM

Is this the folkiedave theory of critical validation based on how much you can flog a book for? I have a first edition of A Shropshire Lad. Is it folk? Is it feck BTW I paid 20p for it at a jumble sale in v.good nick, what's it worth? And does it make Housman a good poet?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:35 PM

I haven't looked at Rod's site for ages - pressure of time really.

I know Mike's work on the Revival appeared there - not sure which came first.

I also seem to remember that Alistair Banfield (real expert on folk song records), had a lot to do with the Topic Discography and that was acknowledged on the site - but I am doing that from memory.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:20 PM

"Mike Brocken - "The English Folk Revival"

I believe I'm right in saying the Mike Brocken's book originally appeared as a series of articles on Rod Stradling's Musical Traditions website.

Mike Brocken is also the author of the complete Topic Records Discography, also to be found on the Musical Traditions website

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 02:56 PM

what other serious analysis of folk music has taken place that isn't anthropology or taxonomy/collection? Something in other words that hasn't emerged from those with a vested interest?

Well under "A" there is David Atkinson's book "The English Traditional Ballad".

Under "B" Mike Brocken - "The English Folk Revival"

Under "C" there is Robert Cantwell's book "When We were Good- The Folk Revival".

Under "D" the well-known Ginette Dunn "Fellowship of Song"

Under "E" Roger Elbourne's book about "Lancashire Music and Tradition in Early Industrial Lancashire".

Do I really have to go through the rest of the alphabet?

I suppose publishing a book could be a vested interest.

So what your question says is "What books have been produced about folk song that have been produced by people who haven't written any books?

An interesting contribution to the debate.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 02:53 PM

I'm sure you meant to say Do you mean the 'vested interest' of somebody who desperately wants there to be a definition of 'folk'(whatever that means)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 02:42 PM

Wilgus did some interesting work Folkiedave, especially in categorising texts according to narrative,

Never mind it must be a different Wilgus you are looking at. I'm
looking at the one that devotes half of its content to "the controversy over the communal nature of the ballad".

Little to do with taxonomy and even less to do with collection.

However if it doesn't float your boat - no problem - it's since been sold.

one is that people really don't give a shit about it, two you won't get a debate worth a damn that doesn't come back to collection and attribution and three, there are few neutral and intelligent voices - each has some professional or quasi-professional axe to grind.

Got a nice one for you. "Folk Song: Tradition, Revival and Re-Creation" the book that came from the 1998 Conference in Sheffield. "A fascinating and timely collection of new insights in the field of folk song, representing the exciting diversity of current research and deserves to be read by scholars and folk revival participants alike".

Or to put it another way - 36 people who do give a shit. Some were professionals in the field of folk music or folklore or even folklife, and some were not.

Incidentally what does "quasi-professional axe to grind" mean in this context? Give us an example of someone? No? I thought not. Evidence means little to you of course.

Now this book is exactly what you are looking for and there is only one listed on ABE books and that costs - believe it or not - £210.00.

Since you are have an interest in this sort of thing I can do it for exactly 50% of that price - £105.00. What an offer!!

And of course I include postage. Quick - before that one is sold too.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 01:44 PM

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 01:27 PM

Do you mean the 'vested interest' of somebody who desperately wants there to be no definition of 'folk' so they are able to describe the stuff the write as 'folk' Now why do I doubt that's what you mean?
Now about this 'egotistical and narcissistic bitching....'?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 01:17 PM

And explain what sort of "criticism" you mean.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 01:09 PM

Explain 'vested' interests
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 12:35 PM

You didn't answer my points Jim, especially what other serious analysis of folk music has taken place that isn't anthropology or taxonomy/collection? Something in other words that hasn't emerged from those with a vested interest?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 11:59 AM

"Folk will get a real, honest to God, 3-dimensional appraisal one day soon, away from narcissists whose lives are so entangled with it they think three hundred years will disappear if they stop bitching for 3 seconds but it probably won't be on this board.
This board is for polishing your ego. It has almost nothing to do with folk music."
Glueman
I assume the above statement is aimed at everybody but yourself - you are the only one here isn't narcassistic and who isn't 'bitching' and 'polishing his ego'.
These threads have everything to do with music are not displays of ego - though, in your case..... They are made bcause the contributors care enough to take the trouble to make them.
Justify your statements, or will they go the way of all your other arrogant pronouncements of a similar nature which you have made and walked away from?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Bryn Pugh
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 11:24 AM

Like Richard, I have no little string of publications to my name.

When I first took up the study of Law, many moons ago, something a Tutor said has been with me since, and I think is equally applicable to discussion on, analysis of, history and provenance of a song.

"Any eejit (sp. ?) can make a statement. Lawters are a special kind of eejit - a Lawyer makes a statement and supports it with Authority".

For 'Lawyer' in the quotes above, substitute "folkie".

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 11:16 AM

From: Dave Hanson - PM
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:13 AM

I promise I will NEVER even open a Lizzie Cornish thread EVER again, they are without exception started with one purpose in mind, so that people will talk about Lizzie Cornish, she craves and adores the attention, she doesn't care what is said as long as it is about her, for me, no more forever.

Dave H

Sorry Hanson is no one talking to YOU..there there poor thing!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 11:10 AM

Ah - correct name. Let's see. Oh yes, Richard Bridge.

Let me see if I have this right, Gg. You don't care whether it's a folk song or not, (and indeed possibly you think it's a bad thing that we should care whether it's a folk song or not) but you think we should care whether it's a GOOD folk song or not.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:32 AM

Wilgus did some interesting work Folkiedave, especially in categorising texts according to narrative, however his view is essentially still of collection and taxonomy, not critical theory. Thanks for the offer anyway.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:26 AM

Times like this I think Mudcat should close its doors to casual browsers & non-members. Entry should be for the truly committed Folk Enthusiast only, committed enough to apply for membership, under their own names,

I'm Dave Eyre if you didn't know already. Jim Carroll is Jim Carroll, and Diane Easby is Diane Easby. Ruth Archer is fairly well-known but I am sure she will be happy to say who she is.

I suspect CV's would be embarassing for a lot of people. Photos of me certainly are.

Dave Eyre

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:24 AM

Reg [Meuross] has been criticised by fRoots and Diane

As a point of information, Mr Meuross criticised fRoots for not reviewing one of his CDs, a musical offering which, though good, did not fall into the fR remit of being rooted in a tradition. Some of his work does, some does not.

He did this in a BBC blog in which he speculated that the reason for this omission was, extraordinarily, because of his gender. I commented that this was not only petulant but sexist. End of.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:23 AM

Folk has had limited critical theoretical analysis for a few reasons....

There is a wealth of critical analysis. Let me sell you a few books.

Start with D.K. Wilgus. "Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898".

I'll do you a copy in extremely good condition for £12.00. For you I'll even pay the postage.

When you have read that I'll suggest some more. I have loads. It's what booksellers do. You should have asked earlier.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:19 AM

You mean it's not worth anything if you think about it?

I mean it's a minority specialism with a core of ageing grunters forever locking horns with each other over ideological minutiae, which is what this thread seems to be mostly about, other than more gratuitous Lizzie / Glueman bashing.

Times like this I think Mudcat should close its doors to casual browsers & non-members. Entry should be for the truly committed Folk Enthusiast only, committed enough to apply for membership, under their own names, with a full CV & photographic ID provided.

Maybe then we might start treating each other with some respect.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:11 AM

WHY is the English folk world supposed to be so devoid of emotion????? Why is a music that is emotion itself surrounded by people who despise emotional things being said about the songs or the people who perform them.

There you go again Lizzie!!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:08 AM

You haven't addressed any of my points Jim, you are confirming them.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Howard Jones
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:06 AM

Richard, off the top of my head there's the Journal of the EFDSS and various academic journals/websites, however most of these are only available on-line if you're associated with an academic institution. Musical Traditions website contains a lot of well-researched articles.

For less academic but usually well-informed research/criticsm there's English Dance and Song, fRoots, Living Tradition and other magazines.

There's also the tradtunes discussion group, which seems less inclined to disolve into abuse and bitching than Mudcat:)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 10:00 AM

"Why is it that you felt it necessary to create a myspace site in memory of Private Harry Farr (which, by the way, I think is excellent)in response to Reg Meuross' song "And Jesus wept..."?

Does this not go some way to qualifying you for your own definition of 'Professor'?"

Well, Pete, Reg gave us the most wonderful introduction to the song, he more of less created that page, as I sat there listening to him. He brought Harry into that room with us, made us feel his fear, his horror, his pain...He took us to his family, the shame they felt, the way they cut Harry off...

Reg is a MASTER Storyteller, same as John Tams is....

By the time Reg had finished singing the song, Harry's page had already been 'born' in my head. It took a few months though, before it became reality...and then, one day, I sat down at the computer...and who knows, maybe Harry was right beside me, as I listened to Reg's song, but...by the end of the day, there was Harry's story, recreated pretty much as Reg had told it, with a few extras added.

Reg would never make anyone feel inferior for not knowing the history of a song though, he'd only ever want to inform, uplift and teach...and yet...Reg has been criticised by fRoots and Diane, and belittled too, by both. Again, he is a MASTER storyteller, and one the folk world should show far more respect to.

I have nothing but admiration for Reg Meuross...and detractors please not, the word is ADMIRATION, ***not*** ADULATION.


Richard, your comments about me making 'fan' type comments about Kate Rusby, I take objection over. I simply love Kate's gentle music and songs.

WHY is the English folk world supposed to be so devoid of emotion????? Why is a music that is emotion itself surrounded by people who despise emotional things being said about the songs or the people who perform them.

I learnt a long time back that life is short, life is fragile, and if I get the chance to emote about something, to spread sparkles about it, then I damn well will.   

Maybe, because the US and Canadian posters are more in touch with their feelings, they are far more relaxed about their music. We need to stop being so damned 'British' about it, and let ourselves GO!

If you LOVE the music of someone, then talk about it, in a way that brings others in.

Here you go, Pete...once more...Harry's page...born from the sheer beauty of a song, which took me right inside the life of a man....

Harry Farr's Myspace - Made for Reg Meuross's song '..and Jesus Wept'

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 09:55 AM

"I guess this is part of the reason folk enjoys such a lowly status with respect of British Culture as whole."
You mean it's not worth anything if you think about it?
"Qualifying what I say Jim, leads down a one-dimension historical track of pedants yattata yattata, yattata etc"
Justifying sweeping unqualified generalistions by burying them in verbiage is one way of getting away with them I suppose.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 09:31 AM

Where, Howard?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:27 AM

That is your opinion.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:26 AM

HJ I have no problem with Mudcat being a fan site. I get twitchy when it abuses other posters for being mere fans.

Me too. But that "fan" ain't Lizzie......

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:24 AM

HJ I have no problem with Mudcat being a fan site. I get twitchy when it abuses other posters for being mere fans. A variety of opinion is good, a dearth of it bad but it is all - just opinion.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Howard Jones
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:18 AM

Glueman, you appear to be overlooking the fact that this is a discussion forum for enthusiasts, not academics. There is plenty of serious academic study but you'll have to look elsewhere for it.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: manitas_at_work
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:03 AM

But if you're not here to discuss the songs, why are you here? Is this website just to be here to host a collection of lyrics or is it to add to out knowledge and understanding of them? And don't pretend that discussion and "Intellectulising" of song lyrics only happens in the folk world - try googling "American Pie" for example.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:00 AM

"Folk music criticism"?

???

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:56 AM

Qualifying what I say Jim, leads down a one-dimension historical track of pedants and borderline asperger's cases (with sympathy to anyone suffering from autism) who aren't satisfied till they get the answer they want to hear and are prepared for an attrition of any length to achieve it. Folk has had limited critical theoretical analysis for a few reasons, one is that people really don't give a shit about it, two you won't get a debate worth a damn that doesn't come back to collection and attribution and three, there are few neutral and intelligent voices - each has some professional or quasi-professional axe to grind. Compared to the debates around folklore, folk music criticism is in the intellectual nursery and this board is pleased to act as nanny.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: manitas_at_work
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:56 AM

You haven't let a single word of the above sink in, have you? BTW, "Intellectulising" isn't a word. If you're going to attack someone for something at least learn to spell what you're attacking them for.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:54 AM

I guess this is part of the reason folk enjoys such a lowly status with respect of British Culture as whole. Personally I wouldn't have it any other way...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:35 AM

gosh i didnt know that listening and enjoying music can be so difficult reading these threads. Intellectulising "wow is that a word" over music too much takes the fun out of actually listening to it, and instead of just listening you just want to pull all music apart where is the fun in that. The rhythm has gone and it becomes stilted.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:07 AM

"How has it become so controlled by those who demand that the correct history of the song is constantly given out...."
Perhps it would hlp clarify things if Lizzie could give us some examples of this.
"Folk will get a real, honest to God, 3-dimensional appraisal one day soon, away from narcissists whose lives are so entangled with it they think three hundred years will disappear if they stop bitching for 3 seconds but it probably won't be on this board."
Would ask Glueman the same, but have come to realise that he doesn't qualify his wild accusations.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: theleveller
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 06:58 AM

Lizzie, to return to your original post:

"How has it become so controlled by those who demand that the correct history of the song is constantly given out...."

Why is it that you felt it necessary to create a myspace site in memory of Private Harry Farr (which, by the way, I think is excellent)in response to Reg Meuross' song "And Jesus wept..."?

Does this not go some way to qualifying you for your own definition of 'Professor'?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 06:45 AM

"As (orginally) a history teacher I dislike it when people get facts wrong. (Like stating black is a colour- mea culpa)."

Don't beat yers'en up Dave - it's one of the little facts I'm rather sadly pedantic about. I get plenty of others wrong! :-)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 06:38 AM

And I'll take that 200...........

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 06:37 AM

Lizzie is not always wrong and I simply avoid her too when she does not make unsubstantiated statements. As most people do.

As (orginally) a history teacher I dislike it when people get facts wrong. (Like stating black is a colour- mea culpa).

From your Kate Rusby thread:

"Kate's not frightened of chopping and changing traditional songs around, she readily admits that, and perhaps that's why she gets such strife from some folks in the pedantic English folk world, who demand that songs are sung the 'correct' way, 'their' way.

I know of no-one who says that about Kate, and the important thing is Lizzie - neither do you. I have never met in the past thirty years involvement in folk music who demand that people sing a song in a particular way. But all I ask is that you produce let's say two people who have said something vaguely like that.

Let me just take another example of how Lizzie turns things around to produce nonsense, this from her latest missive.

involved by those who deem themselves The Professors, and feel it is their right to talk down to The Peasants.

There isn't anyone who has deemed themselves "Professors" Lizzie, nor is there anyone who accepts the term "Peasant" about themselves that I can see - they were terms you alone and by yourself with no help from anyone came up with. But of course that was some days ago now and you have probably forgotten.

The only thing the English folk world is not accepting of, as far as I can see is people who write unsubstantiated nonsense. Or as I prefer to call it - bollocks.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Mary Brennan
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 06:11 AM

Durr!!!!!!!!

Thanks. I feel silly now!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:58 AM

Folk will get a real, honest to God, 3-dimensional appraisal one day soon, away from narcissists whose lives are so entangled with it they think three hundred years will disappear if they stop bitching for 3 seconds but it probably won't be on this board.

This board is for polishing your ego. It has almost nothing to do with folk music.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:56 AM

I just wondered why some of you call her the OP.

"original poster", the person who started the thread in question.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:42 AM

While Lizzie can be infuriating, she is not always wrong. The Eliza Carthy thread for example was I think helpful to a number of people and pointed them to something they were happy to see. I did not and do not see the need for the spikiness pointed at LIzzie there. The Krusby thread itself is in a different position. Lizzie's posts there did get steadily more fanzine, but to some extent she was driven to it. What is not in order, it seems to me, regarding that thread is her winge about the attribution debate. Attribution is important. That is why for example modern authors have "moral rights" of attribution - the right to be identified as the author of a work. Also, given the nature of the difference between folk and other music, a scholar's deliberate falsification of his research is worthy of comment - and indeed the slipshod nature of modern documentary making deserved a baying mob.

On the other hand, this thread is based on a lie: that the "professors" have in some way stopped the "peasants" from participating in the peasants' heritage. They have not.




Unfortunately it is not always possible to avoid threads from people who annoy: the thread titles do not identify the OP until the thread has been opened.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Mary Brennan
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:39 AM

Lizzie's attitude and abuse - of other posters.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Mary Brennan
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:38 AM

What Bryn said!

Any thread that Lizzie gets involved in goes the same way: lots of twittering from Lizzie then she starts abusing people who try to discuss things with her.

I find Lizzie's whole attitude abuse very upsetting so I don't contribute much.

I just wondered why some of you call her the OP.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 05:27 AM

If you can't see that folk is perceived through the historically valorised position of its enthusuasts to the detriment of other readings, nothing I say will convince you.

What's really amusing is that you're accusing other people of living in a "hermetic world".

Ahem. I was just going to say I agree with Bryn and Dave H and Ruth, but I got sidetracked. I'd better pledge not to respond to glueman for good measure.

Anyone want to start that 'introductions' thread?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Bryn Pugh
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:58 AM

First : what Ruth said supra, 2nd June at 0935.

Second : what Dave H said, 3rd June at 03.13.

I am with you, Dave H. The whole point of Mad Lizzie starting a thread is so she can get the attention which is patently absent otherwise in her life.

Sad. There are certain 'Catters, whose threads I give the go-by.

Mad Lizzie has just joined this exclusive sect.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: manitas_at_work
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:43 AM

"is the condescension involved by those who deem themselves The Professors, and feel it is their right to talk down to The Peasants.
"

The best way to avoid these people is to wear tin-foil under your hat.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:32 AM

"I promise I will NEVER even open a Lizzie Cornish thread EVER again, they are without exception started with one purpose in mind, so that people will talk about Lizzie Cornish, she craves and adores the attention, she doesn't care what is said as long as it is about her, for me, no more forever."

Excellent Dave, that's one less poster to abuse me from now on then. Thank you for finally bowing out.

Hey, do you recall though, that conversation we had, when I told you how upset I was, over having had my freedom of speech taken away on the BBC, by you and your mates, after years of constant abuse? Do you recall that you came back to me, saying 'Hey Lizzie, it's just a bit of fun, that's all.'...and do you recall how I told you that it had gone way beyond 'fun'. Write what you want to me 'in private'....but please, don't distort the views of those who may know nothing of what's been following me around for years.

This thread was...actually...started in exasperation over the pedantic ramblings concerning A.L. Lloyd, in Kate Rusby's thread...a thread which I started for no other reason than to pass a link on to others, should they want to watch it, because I happen to love Kate's music. I know that many others do as well, including many on Mudcat. But down came The Professors, who sucked out the joy and happiness in that thread. Fair enough, threads go like that, conversation goes of at tangents all the time, and there are always some things that come out of threads going off topic which always prove interesting...

But I started this thread because I am sick of the way certain people think they are the be all and end all of the folk world, and their condescending manner really gets up my nose at times. I started it to try and find out how it's happened and why.

Yes, of course it's interesting to hear the stories behind the songs, and...if you have the gift of telling the story in the right way, then much will be learned by many. I've spoken about how John Tams does this so brilliantly, above.

But just coming out with intense facts and dates, can actually, (for me at least) be really boring and a complete and utter turn off. Far more than that though, is the condescension involved by those who deem themselves The Professors, and feel it is their right to talk down to The Peasants.

It ain't.

Teaching is NOT about being condescending. Teaching is about an absolute willingness to share your knowledge, in an inspirational, uplifting and non-abusive manner....and as you can see, by much of the crap written in here...it is a gift that not everyone in the English folk world has.

As I've said before, I do NOT see this sort of reaction in the Australian, US and Canadian posters....They have the gift of simply seeming able to love the songs, never using the facts that lie behind them as weapons.

And someoe mentioned above about starting a new thread, leading off this one, about how people introduce songs. I think that's a wondeful idea, but of course, if I do it, the usual crap will start, so I hope that someone else may do that instead..

Good to hear that I won't have to endure any more of your verbal abuse though, Dave. That's really cheered me up. I thank you for that.

Lizzie

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 04:03 AM

Thank God the Pissing-Contest appears to be over.
Amen DH.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Mike Rogers
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:51 AM

SpleenCringe is absolutely 100 % right.

Don't feed the troll.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 03:13 AM

I promise I will NEVER even open a Lizzie Cornish thread EVER again, they are without exception started with one purpose in mind, so that people will talk about Lizzie Cornish, she craves and adores the attention, she doesn't care what is said as long as it is about her, for me, no more forever.

Dave H

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: The Barden of England
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:25 PM

Looking more like 'Pedants to Professors' with each post. :o)
John Barden

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Gedi
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:03 PM

I second what Spleen said above. Time for a little decorum folks!

Ged

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:40 PM

I have found that some musicians tend to introduce songs with a lecture or a sermon, generally they're preaching to the converted so to speak.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Banjiman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:23 PM

Barbara,

I think you have hit on a really interesting question around the best way to introduce songs that probably deserves a seperate, sensible thread..... fancy starting one?

Paul

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: BB
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:46 PM

I'm seriously wondering whether I dare jump in here, but someone way up there on this thread (I think it was Glueman, but I can't now find it) said that they never use more than ten words to introduce a song.

I find that very sad. I'm not suggesting lectures, but conversationally toned intros. just putting songs in context is surely going to enhance an audience's enjoyment of the songs. Obviously too one picks where one does that - i.e. it needs to be somewhere where the audience is actually quiet enough to listen to the intros. - a (folk) club, concert or village hall - not a pub gig or anywhere where the audience couldn't give a damn.

And this doesn't just apply to 'folkie' audiences - it's been my experience in village hall gigs with not a folk enthusiast in sight. In fact, those are the very people who sometimes need the songs put in context, because they're not used to the genre, and it helps them to understand where these 'strange' songs are coming from.

And how do I know what they think? - because they've come and told me afterwards how much they've enjoyed the fact that we do tell them something about the songs - sometimes with the words, 'I didn't think I liked folk music, but ...'

No, introductions are not for all people, circumstances or venues, but they have their place, and with skilled introductions can make a real difference to people's perceptions.

Barbara

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:34 PM

Time and again Lizzie starts threads purely with the intention of provoking a response or winding people up. She knows exactly what she's doing.

Time and again decent people who should know better fall for her game hook, line and sinker and contribute to escalating a minor irritation into a major event.

Time and again eminently sensible people like Joe Offer and Big Mick implore us to ignore provocative threads and refuse to rise to the bait.

Yet here we are up to 180-odd posts on the back of a few lines of nonsense!

Can I please, please implore that we let our better natures triumph and greet future threads like this with the silence they deserve? PLEASE...

That's all I have to say on the matter. Don't tell me any of you are actually enjoying this?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: theleveller
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:25 PM

"I'm off to skin me a ferret pelt bikini. "

Now that's downright cruel - especially if you wear the furry side inside.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 01:28 PM

telling someone their opinion is 'bollocks',

Since I was probably the first person to say on this thread that what she wrote was bollocks. would you be kind enough to place that into context?

In this and other threads Lizzie has made unsubstantiated statement after unsubstantiated statement about folk music. She has a history of it. She does it on the basis of non-existent evidence. This thread started with her "impression". She is perfectly entitled to her "impressions" but to publish them on a board like this which is for discussion of a particular genre of music I would have thought needs a certain amount of "rigour".

Here she is as the OP:

"I get the impression that Kate is regarded poorly by The Traditionalists because she dares to change the songs around, chop bits out here and there, add other bits.

Evidence for this impression? None.

I know of no-one else who says this about anyone who does that to songsMost singers do it with traditional songs. It makes them singable. I showed Lizzie where this was done with a couple of well-known books.

I also pointed out to Lizzie that the EFDSS magazine runs a feature about this and quoted a current example.

And I don't know who these "traditionalists" are. It is after all a name she has made up. I don't know who the Professors are either. She made a post about me being a member of the "Folk Police" on another board that was frankly libellous. It was taken down when I complained.

So what she writes is round spherical objects – unless she can back it up with evidence.

Here she is again:

"What I'm trying to say is that many people are put OFF the songs that once used to belong to them because of how serious it's all become."

Is she personally put off the songs? Actually no, she isn't – she tells us that constantly. So who are these "many people? I don't know and whilst I have never particularly looked for them I have never come across anyone who says anything remotely like that.

Round spherical objects again.

You could do this with virtually every single post she makes.

It isn't that she has opinions that people I and others disagree with. It is that she has opinions that are generally demonstrably wrong. What people do is point this out.

Or to put it another way, she talks bollocks.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:58 PM

Backwoodsman, go back through the thread. Read my contributions again. Then read those by others. There was abuse, there was name-calling. It wasn't by me. That's a presumption you've made.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:54 PM

I've always understood that 'from the singing of.....' is intended to imply that, whilst the song was learned from the performance(s), either face-to-face or recorded, of a given artist, the artist was not the composer, or the composer is anon.

I could well be wrong - I appear to be wrong about most things at the moment. :-)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:51 PM

Oh, and in case any other dimshits have not got it the point of my "arrest warrant" thread is to demonstrate that knowing the difference between folk music and other types does not prevent enjoyment of the other types, nor does it inhibit the folk process.

Indeed not - pedantry in all things however so benign the eclecticism. It's no less than we've come to expect. English folk - peasants to pedants...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:49 PM

most of their songs were "from the singing of" - in my naivety I assumed that they had indeed learnt them face to face, but further research revealed that they could only have learnt them from records.

If you learn a song from a recording - alter it, add or subtract some verses and you feel you ought to credit it to the source you started it from - what form of words could you use? Perhaps you don't feel it necessary to do so, and there is no problem with that. I think it is a generally recognised convention within folk music. I may be wrong.

"From the singing of....." sounds OK to me. It means I learnt it from a record - usually - but I may have altered it.

"I learnt this from....." implies face-to-face a totally different meaning.

Undoubtedly some people mix these up and interchange them. I can live with that.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:48 PM

I've explained myself. Understand or don't understand. Your choice, not my problem.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:46 PM

"(and I do have a bit of a string of publications to my name)"

Post of the Month?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:39 PM

Oh, hurrah! Sanctimony R Us! Talk about predictable - it's the Lincolnshire Heavy Mob!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Banjiman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:32 PM

What Backwoodsman said at 12:16 PM. I'm with that.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:27 PM

"of my "arrest warrant" thread " which despite my great sense of humour, really isn't very funny.
and now I've wasted far too much time on this...time to plan an actual gig rather than talk up one..ahhh..busy busy!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:23 PM

"I'm off to skin me a ferret pelt bikini."

I love it! :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:22 PM

Oh, and in case any other dimshits have not got it the point of my "arrest warrant" thread is to demonstrate that knowing the difference between folk music and other types does not prevent enjoyment of the other types, nor does it inhibit the folk process.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:20 PM

Rifleman, Gg spouts gibberish. The way to show it is gibberish is to take it apart. Your problem?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Silas
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:18 PM

It would appear that the OP has achieved her objective.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:16 PM

Ruth, some of us read to learn. A lot of what I read is informative (much of it from both you and Princess D, AIH). That we don't post is not what matters, it's the content of what we read that's important. And much of the content of this and certain other threads is not by any stretch of the imagination 'discussion', intellectual or otherwise, it is simply public provocation, ranting and insult-hurling.

I'm fully aware that there are things 'going on' - it's deplorable that individuals feel the need to poke others with sharp sticks - I'm not taking sides, just asking those who want a punch-up to do it elsewhere so that those of us who want to read, learn, discuss, whatever, can do itb without the distraction of fishwifery and schoolgirl antics.

You, and others, give your opinions on this forum frequently, robustly and, at times, abrasively. It's equally my right to do the same. My comments aren't made in order to poke you or anyone else with another sharp stick. They are simply a request for order - made to everyone involved in this unseemly, petulant brou-ha-ha.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:16 PM

I'm neither middle-class nor a graduate, I'm a fresh enthusiast who sings and thinks that the history adds interest - and indeed respect to the songs originators. If it doesn't add interest for someone else, there's no reason to sweat it? No-one's forcing anyone to write a thesis. I don't know a lot about the songs I sing to be honest - I check out some of the information available and store the bits that interest me away, much gets lost too (but like Lizzie, I'm not a walking archive either). But where I do read stuff about them, I like to know it's at least right. And I don't expect a lengthy lecture at a singing session either. Though some brief conversational intro's are indeed most engaging. I do however think, that professional recording artists have a degree of responsibility, to ensure that they get whatever historical facts they choose to publish about the songs they record, as up to date as possible (because the public will trust it's correct). Same care shown with key details as you would any piece of publishing surely? Mistakes will of course always be made, but that's not a very good excuse for willfully perpetuating them IMO, or indeed abandoning the history altogether as irrelevant. I don't know where Lizzies's coming from in her assertions that 'professors stole it off the peasants'. This entire thread seems daft - maybe they're a nicer bunch now? There's an argument being made out of no argument, or so it seems to me! Like I said, Lizzie's style makes me bloody laugh sometimes. Though I do wish she could back off the academic bashing. I don't see what her justifications really are, except that they can be grumpy old men at times - though usually amongst themselves. Then again, that makes me laugh too...
What is this thread all about? I'm off to skin me a ferret pelt bikini.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Silas
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:14 PM

Does this post accept 'guest' posters?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:12 PM

"If you disagree, take it up with the management."

Joe Offer doesn't get involved as you know on the not unreasonable basis that folkies 'eat their young.' Others provide the place settings and cutlery.

"People who only participate in a discussion to tell off the participants can be particularly tedious and smug."

Indeed.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:02 PM

Mudcat is apparently all about free speech. Don't like it, don't read it is the credo these days. People who only participate in a discussion to tell off the participants can be particularly tedious and smug. IMHO, of course.

I feel all of my responses in this thread have been perfectly measured and appropriate, which is more than I can say about the recent discussions in which the OP repeatedly attempted to put the boot into the festival where I work and an organisation with which I am associated. Yeah, you're right - it fuckin' stinks.

If you disagree, take it up with the management.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:01 PM

WTF?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 12:00 PM

I'm not going to argue with you, my late mother always said never to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person. It seems to me that you enjoy calling other people pretentious, but when the role is reversed, you can't deal with it.

There's a fairly old saying I'm familiar with...if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:53 AM

Ruth, you and Princess Di are pissed-off with LC - I understand that. But the value of much of the real discussion has been detracted from by the hysterics and personal insults (both ways), which have no place here.

If people dislike one anther, fine. I understand that too - I'm not stupid and I've seen the stuff on other threads (and I've defended you when you were being attacked recently). But take the shrieking and rowing behind the bike-shed and slug it out there, in private.

Please ladies.

And yes Diane, don't bother. I know you're not a lady.

10-4 Good buddies.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:50 AM

See above.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:48 AM

Gg, the first thing you learn in legal writing (and I do have a bit of a string of publications to my name) is that it is wise not to write things that are meaningless. The second is to try to be sure that what you have written means what you intended. You seem to fail on both counts.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:48 AM

Business as usual in the ossuary then. Onedownmanship, the unplumbed depths of human nature over old songs with a side order of vanity and delirium tremens.
Not very edifying this folk business.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:47 AM

It's schoolgirl playground stuff Diane.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:46 AM

Backwoodsman, this thread was never going to be "an interesting discussion" because it was started in a spirit of shit-stirring. Plus ca change.

I found your abrasive and confrontational post equally depressing. So I guess we're even.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:46 AM

I see Richard Bridge is indulging in his epic length pretentiousness AGAIN! (Cecil B. DeMille must be so proud*LOL*)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:37 AM

It wouldn't have mattered who "jumped in".
You were deliberately misrepresenting what large numbers of people, in threads passim over long weary time, have said.
Not clever and not funny, nor peasant-like nor professorial.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: theleveller
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:36 AM

"I have a problem being told that I should get on and read those books...go into the history of it all, over and again,"

Lizzie, I'm genuinely confused here. Who is telling you to do this? People have sometimes suggested to me that I might be interested in finding out more about the folk songs I love and I've been more than happy to follow this up as research of this sort is something I find ejoyable and interesting. No-one has ever told me that I can't enjoy the music without doing this research.

I don't think it's helpful to create artificial antagonisms by suggesting there are two extremes of peasants and professors. Neither of these exists in reality and, even if they did, there would be more common ground than antithesis. The head and the heart cannot exist in isolation.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:32 AM

I don't flounce, nor dance in front of Boysies...although.....maybe that's where I've been going wrong! ;0) You'll not part me from my glitter though, no way. Maybe I should dance in front of those Shropshire Bedlam Boysies this year....Hmmmm... :0)

I'm listening to Chris Smither at the moment, with the Waves of Sidmouth as his backing singers (see Chris's thread). Just wonderful. :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:28 AM

I didn't name names.
Deliberately.
I wanted to see who would jump straight in.
I was neither surprised, nor disappointed.
Some people can't help themselves.
Shame.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:28 AM

The Professors feel they're not doing it in the correct way.

And just who ARE these nameless "Professors" you so much enjoy insulting?

I think there have been only two paid academics mentioned on this thread (or others you've posted to today): Georges Denis Zimmermann and Roy Palmer. Why do you hate them so much?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:22 AM

I thought you were busy polishing your popularist credentials elsewhere Bridge, Pugwash sings the blues or somesuch cods head. Not pretending you had an intellectual thought to bless yourself with. Stick to the back room of pubs and an anaesthetic of choice, eh?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:17 AM

"perceived through the historically valorised position of its enthusuasts to the detriment of other readings"

Let's just have a little look at the meaning of that pretentious phrase shall we?

Hmm. "Historically valorised" - does that mean "factually researched and agreed on the basis of evidence"? If not, then what does it mean?

If it means what it appears to mean then what are "other readings" - unless they are lies, errors, ignorance or fantasy?



Oh, and let's also have a look at "contains a dominant ideology that proscribes ways of consuming the music".    It would I think be quite hard to find a "dominant" perspective on "folk" music (whether 1954 or otherwise). The word "ideology" itself is used in many ways. Literally it means the study of ideas - which is of course what Lizzie states herself to reject - but it may also mean an accepted set or system of beliefs (implicitly within a defined grouping).   It would be hard I think to justify the idea that the opinion of some that knowledge of the history of song is generally accepted across either "horse folk" or "1954 folk", or indeed "sounds like folk to me" groupings. More pointedly, the idea that any such acceptance by any such group "proscribes" (ie prohibits or bans) any ways of enjoying the music. And indeed what is the point of saying "consume"? It obscures the inherent falseness of what Gg says. If you break it down, what might "consume" mean in this sense (since it cannot mean "use up and destroy", as in "consume a meal" or in "consume the world's resources"? It probably means (a) listen to or (b) buy recordings of or (increasingly in the record industry) "pay for". But if those are the meanings intended, then it becomes very plain that no such "consumption" is "proscribed".



"many as academically respectable as an historical reading" - well, assuming that an historical reading (ooh, that "an historical" is as pretentious a piece of pedantry as I've seen in a while, assuming everyone knows about Greek rough and smooth breathings) is a pretty breathtaking piece of smoothing over a gap. What are those other things? Why are they academically respectable?


In short, Gg is spouting as much gibberish as: (a) he usually does; and (b) Lizzie does; although he is covering it up with more flummery.






On a different tack, I would have thought that "from the singing of" is generally understood to mean something quite different from "taught to me by" or "learned (or "got") by me from". I think it is generally understood to mean that the version of the song referred to is the version that was sung or recorded by the named source, and indeed to some extent negates the suggestion that it was learned "live"

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:16 AM

No-one's abused anyone's children (as far as I know), though if anyone gleaned the impression that I thought the OP's actions in depriving her own children of an education was tantamount to child abuse, they're right.
Many contributors have described this same OP's posts as bollocks because they are; unsubstantiated, rambling, contradictory, backed by not a vestige of proof and downright dangerous.
You couldn't grace them with such an elevated description as an "opinion".
Time after time, people spare the patience to advise and point her towards information and knowledge.
But where does she go?
Away with the fucking fairies, prancing and flouncing in glitter in front of mainstages and her "boysies".

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:11 AM

The OP started the thread and the usual suspects passed their dead hand across it, changing it, squeezing the life and fun out of it until it became like all the rest. The crystal slipper made to fit so they could have a ball. That IMHO, stinks.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:10 AM

"bringing personal hatreds out into the public domain."

You're absolutely right there. Look at the OP's first post. If you start a thread as an attack, people will respond in kind.

I thought the recent attacks by the OP on EFDSS and Walter Pardon fuckin' stank, as it happens, but they were allowed to stand.

What was it my mother used to say? Don't dish it out if you can't take it.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:09 AM

Er..guys, I don't want to upset you here...but...if you actually *read* some of my posts, you'll see that I've said over and again I've NO problems with you all loving the music your way, writing your way, or thinking your way. I have a problem being told that I should get on and read those books...go into the history of it all, over and again, because...my mind won't do that. I love it all a different way. I'm happy as I am. Honest.

I love history, the bits I can recall that is. :0) But...history's a mystery to me, dates and all, tumble all around and come out backwards....The Romans come before the Vikings, because R comes before V in the alphabet...See? That's my Timeline. 1645 is a quarter to seven, and that's when we used to meet in the pub after the Sealed Knot (English Civil War) battles. It's just what my brain does, that's all. YOUR brains do lots of other things.

You love the details and the music, I love the colours and the music.
That's all, except I accept that you love your music the way you do, and don't want to love it like I do. Maybe you could take something from that...?

And thank you, Backwoodsman, I was going to bring in the colour spectrum/prism thingyummyjig, but you got there first, well done! ;0)

I *was* alive in 1968...been alive since 1955...and I'm **still** alive....that's why I love those Oysters and Seth's music! LOL Just joking, keep yer knickers on everyone. :0)

Yes, facts ARE important. History IS important. Knowledge IS important...


BUT....

Knowledge should NEVER be used as a weapon to demean, belittle, pontificate or humiliate.

I've said that probably hundreds of times over the years, but it doesn't stop *some* of those with brains that recall facts, from doing just that. Knowledge isn't just about facts, nor even just about history, there is much knowledge that comes from within, that can't be found in books.

John Tams has 'the knowledge'...and 'the magic'...that's why he's a natural teacher.

John Tams is Beyond Professor.
He's a True Teacher.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:07 AM

It could be said that Lloyd operated in reverse fashion: he arrived at a theory of folk music and then "found" the songs to fit it.

Sure it could be. By somebody who knew bugger-all about Lloyd and wanted to know less.

It's more interesting to know what could truthfully be said.

What glueman calls "the embedded historiographic approach" culminates in that preposterous expression "from the singing of". My own introductions rarely exceed ten words: if a song can't sell itself to an audience under its own steam then either I'm singing it badly or it's not worth singing in the first place.

You won't have much time for Utah Phillips, Sheila Stewart or Cathal McConnell, then.

Mostly I do tunes, and I prefer to do afterwords rather than introductions. I aim to play the tune well enough to get people asking what it's about and to have a good and true story to answer them with, no bluffs or shrugs.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:02 AM

"If you don't like the intellectually-based ones, don't take part. Simples."

Absolutely, Ruth.
Unfortunately some, much, of what's been written above isn't 'intellectually-based', it's the usual UK-Mudcat mudslinging, name-calling and people behaving generally like vile hooligans.

Insulting someone, abusing their children, telling someone their opinion is 'bollocks', decrying an individual for simply loving something 'for itself' isn't intellectualised discussion is it?

This is another example of what should have been an interesting discussion which has been ruined by the usual suspects, bringing personal hatreds out into the public domain.

It fuckin' stinks.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 11:01 AM

Well, the Devil's Interval all attended the folk degree at Newcastle. It's quite possible that they were given this form of words as a way of appropriately presenting the songs they were learning from the traditional reprertoire.

Where you saw pretension, perhaps the objective was respect.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:59 AM

what - I want to talk about an idea you've raised, and now I'm condescending? You won't need any help, I hope, knowing how chippy you sound.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: tijuanatime
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:57 AM

>>Given that I was born after Sam Larner died, is it likely that my statement "this is from the singing of..." will mislead anyone in the audience into thinking Sam Larner actually taught it to me...<<

It suppose that depends who your audience is. I've only been interested in this music for two or three years: one of the first concerts I went to was by The Devil's Interval and most of their songs were "from the singing of" - in my naivety I assumed that they had indeed learnt them face to face, but further research revealed that they could only have learnt them from records.

Maybe it's harmless romanticism but that particular form of words strikes me as ineffably pretentious.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:38 AM

"It's an interesting idea, and one I'd be happy to explore further."

And being bright you won't need any help believing how condescending that sounds.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:37 AM

It isn't in 'the spirit of academic rigour' though, is it? It's in the spirit of brow-beating and brinkmanship that marks the rest of Mudcat discussions. Pumeling others into malleable dough the easier to dispose of their words and re-set the folk dial to business as usual.

If you can't see that folk is perceived through the historically valorised position of its enthusuasts to the detriment of other readings, nothing I say will convince you.

You made a statement. I'd like to see some evidence that it is true.

That's all. Complaining about the messenger is not academic rigour.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:35 AM

"To me it implies "I learnt this song face-to-face from a source" and by extension,"I am worthy of mention in the same breath as": I regard it as self-aggrandising. What I suspect it actually means is "I heard this on one of the Voice of the People CDs and I liked the sound it made": that's where I get some of my material from, but I would feel fraudulent using that expression."

Mmmkay. So I want to sing a Sam Larner song. Should I say, "this comes from the repertoire of Sam Larner?" "I learned this from a CD that was made of Sam Larner's LP Now's the Time for Fishing?" Given that I was born after Sam Larner died, is it likely that my statement "this is from the singing of..." will mislead anyone in the audience into thinking Sam Larner actually taught it to me...

I think "from the singing of" simply differentiates a song as being from someone's sung repertoire, rather than having been written by them.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:28 AM

"If you can't see that folk is perceived through the historically valorised position of its enthusuasts to the detriment of other readings, nothing I say will convince you."

Well, no...because you've presented an opinion without giving us any evidence. It's an interesting idea, and one I'd be happy to explore further.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: manitas_at_work
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:27 AM

"What I do have a problem with, is those who look down their noses at others who have a different way of loving the songs."

That's you, that is.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: tijuanatime
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:25 AM

>> that preposterous expression "from the singing of". <<

'Preposterous' or 'simple courtesy'?

This may be a purely personal reaction, but "from the singing of" carries a weight of authenticity that it's rarely able to sustain. To me it implies "I learnt this song face-to-face from a source" and by extension,"I am worthy of mention in the same breath as": I regard it as self-aggrandising. What I suspect it actually means is "I heard this on one of the Voice of the People CDs and I liked the sound it made": that's where I get some of my material from, but I would feel fraudulent using that expression.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:23 AM

It isn't in 'the spirit of academic rigour' though, is it? It's in the spirit of brow-beating and brinkmanship that marks the rest of Mudcat discussions. Pumeling others into malleable dough the easier to dispose of their words and re-set the folk dial to business as usual.

If you can't see that folk is perceived through the historically valorised position of its enthusuasts to the detriment of other readings, nothing I say will convince you.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:20 AM

"Quite. But that suggests there's a proper way to discuss the subject and rules have been breached"

No it doesn't. It suggests that there are dozens of discussions taking place on Mudcat right now. If you don't like the intellectually-based ones, don't take part. Simples.

"If history is of no interest to her should she be banished?"
Of course not - but she should respect others' right to explore and enjoy the music in the ways they choose, and not see that it a threat or some sort of implicit criticism.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:19 AM

"But if you don't like talking about these subjects or the terms in which they are couched, no one is forcing you to do so."

Quite. But that suggests there's a proper way to discuss the subject and rules have been breached

Not really. It just suggests that Lizzie is joining a conversation which is being conducted in a certain way (at the moment, in this forum, for whatever reason) & complaining about the way it's being conducted. Which very rarely works, if only because of the relative numbers involved.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:14 AM

It's one thing to be proprietorial about favourite tunes but ownership has extended itself across folk as a whole, even to the extent of marshalling the terms by which the discussion takes place it seems.

An interesting argument. Show us (in the spirit of academic rigour of course) some of the favourite tunes about which people are proprietorial. And give (again in the spirit of academic rigour) examples of where the terms by which the discussion takes place have been marshalled.

Which terms do you mean?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:06 AM

I disagree with some things she says but not because her approach is invalid.

I disagree with the things she says because she does not support them with any evidence.

She disagreed with me saying dyslexia was a problem. I never said anything of the sort but that didn't stop her writing it down on here. I said it gave rise to problems, and that her super-hero in the field of dyslexia said the same as me. Funny but we never heard much more about it after that.

This started because Lizzie said "How has it become so controlled by those who demand that the correct history of the song is constantly given out, when these songs were sung by people who didn't give a shite about the history of them....They just SANG them, and I've no doubt that each time they were sung they were changed, notes here and there, words, intonation, etc..."

Example after example have now been given to show where this is simply not true.

But no matter about the evidence, Lizzie still believes it so, without any evidence whatsoever note - NO EVIDENCE - she can still insist it is true.

That is why I say she is talking bollocks.

Incidentally I think the hair of my true love has had some chemical additions.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 10:02 AM

"But if you don't like talking about these subjects or the terms in which they are couched, no one is forcing you to do so."

Quite. But that suggests there's a proper way to discuss the subject and rules have been breached whereas Lizzie is usually running along in parallel doing her own thing. I'm not sure what that thing is but it attracts undue amounts of opprobrium.
If history is of no interest to her should she be banished? If I put folk no higher or lower than other musical genres, or aren't fussed about singing old songs because I own recordings of them that are better than I can achieve, or can't be bothered challenging artificial attitudes that have aggregated around certain soungs and their singing should I also be pilloried also?

It's one thing to be proprietorial about favourite tunes but ownership has extended itself across folk as a whole, even to the extent of marshalling the terms by which the discussion takes place it seems. That's neither academically rigorous or particularly cool.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:56 AM

"What's the colour of my true love's hair, then?"

Mousy. But 'mousy' doesn't sound as good as 'black' in a song, Pip.

"Mousy is the colour of my true love's hair....."
Just don't ring, do it? :-) :-)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Brian Peters
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:43 AM

>> that preposterous expression "from the singing of". <<

'Preposterous' or 'simple courtesy'?

>> Folk more than most types of music... contains a dominant ideology that proscribes ways of consuming the music. Let's name it for what it is, bullying by one group over another... <<

And let's name that statement for what it is: fantasy.

Like Ruth, I want to know who these so-called 'professors' are, that have the power and inclination to stop other people enjoying music. If you want to listen to music, go and listen to it. If you don't want discussions about it, don't join an online discussion group.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:41 AM

Black is not a colour.

What's the colour of my true love's hair, then?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:38 AM

"Lizzie you can say black is a colour and no-one will disagree."

Well, just to lighten this thread up a little, I would disagree. Black is not a colour. Black absorbs all colours of the spectrum and does not reflect any to the eye. It is therefore not a colour. Ask any artist or physicist.

There, isn't that much better than this stupid, interminable, childish bickering and insult-hurling by (presumably) adults who should have better ways of passing their time?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:37 AM

No it doesn't. Why can't you understand that? Anyone is free to enjoy the music any way they like. If they want to remain ignorant they can. If they want to get their knickers in a twist, they can.

But some of those who wilfully do that seem to have a great resentment that others may get more from the music by knowing something about it.

And the informed historical approach does offer more. It in no way reduces the musical pleasure. It in no way inhibits the imagination. It enables the political dimension. So it offers at least two enhancements that ignorance does not.

I am curious though. Waht is the objection to the expression "from the singing of"? It seems a parallel to the common usage of "an "x" song" to mean a song recorded by, rather than written by "x".

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Morris-ey
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:37 AM

>>What many, however, object to is fallacious claptrap, rantings about ignorance being bliss, and a resentment that those who do know more do know more.<<

amen.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:35 AM

Lizzie's pillioring is largely to do with her insistance that everyone else should view the world exactly as she does, enthuse over the same bands that she does, express their enthusiasm on precisely the same terms she does. Lizzie is pillioried because, in a frenzy of anti-intellectual self-righteousness, she makes unfounded and ignorant attacks on organisations like EFDSS and people like Walter Pardon.

I am not going to stop discussing subjects that interest me just because doing so makes someone else feel insecure. Put it another way: there are millions of breathless, squeeing fansites on the internet, for folk as much as any other music. Mudcat is one of the only places where serious discussions of folk music can and do take place. I have learned a hell of a lot from being here, which is why I keep returning, despite the lunacy. And I will keep coming, and contributing to and reading interesting discussions (I read a lot more threads than I actually participate in, inluding some of the political ones below the line), because I like to learn and discover new things.

If that makes me a bully, or an intellectual snob - guilty as charged, I guess. But if you don't like talking about these subjects or the terms in which they are couched, no one is forcing you to do so.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:35 AM

Folk is to a large degree an hermetic world with belief systems, idiologies and received wisdoms none of which hold water against other similar systems.

"Belief systems, ideologies and received wisdoms". Like what? Did you have anything specific in mind?

It is a shortcoming in the participant to believe their's is a more stable view of their subject than any other.

Which I think translates as "You're wrong, I'm right and no returns."

Seriously, I think you should try reducing your distance from participatory folk music some time. I think you'd be pleasantly surprised - or possibly disappointed by the lack of things to complain about.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:29 AM

Hello Flowers, Hello Trees.
Memories of '68 from Lizzie.
Not that she was actually alive then.....
(Memo to self....must go off and find an Elfin Dwarf singing a ballard about an execution...Or some sort of bloodletting, disembowelling, Something warm and sweet, might even harpoon a couple of whales for good measure)
Lizzie. Back to your hippy home. Reality is something different.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:22 AM

Ruth Archer, Folk more than most types of music and this board more than others, contains a dominant ideology that proscribes ways of consuming the music. Let's name it for what it is, bullying by one group over another in the hope they'll leave them to enjoy the music in the way they see fit.

My own distance from participatory folk music is because I believed this to be true years ago and having looked here recently, still think it is so. The informed historical position is seen as an ideal one whereas it is only one way of consuming music, each different, all with unique attributes, many as academically respectable as an historical reading - before we even get into differing modes of historiography. Lizzie's pillorying is primarily because she refuses or is unable to continue a discourse based on such histories. I disagree with some things she says but not because her approach is invalid.

Folk is to a large degree an hermetic world with belief systems, idiologies and received wisdoms none of which hold water against other similar systems. It is a shortcoming in the participant to believe their's is a more stable view of their subject than any other.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:20 AM

"there are also many in here who seek to turn the magic off and bring in Institutionalised Music which HAS to be appreciated in the correct way."

This is an allegation you have made on a number of occasions, Lizzie. I'd like some evidence, please. It is similar to the completely groundless allegations you levied at the EFDSS recently, before admitting you had no actual experience of the organisation, and could cite no occasion on which you had been denied access to its support or resources.

So who is it that says music HAS to be appreciated in the correct way? Who says there is a "correct" way? Names, please, and quotes. I'm genuinely interested.

In recent threads, it has been repeatedly demonstrated to you that those who are interested in history or provenance do not necessarily equate these things with perceptions about contemporary performance of traditional songs. I, for one, love to see people doing interesting and innovative things with traditional music. You should hear the Lomaxy, prison-farm vibe John Jones has given to his new recording of Polly on the Shore, for example. Great stuff. It will be up on the Myspace soon so you can hear for yourself. Or as I said the other day, Jim Moray's Lucy Wan. Or Benjamin Zephaniah's Tam Lin. Bring it on - the more ambitious the better. Admittedly, I feel I have a better understanding of those songs by knowing some of their provenance, and I feel that helps me to appreciate new versions even more.

If you want to dance round your sitting room or a festival field in a floaty dress listening to your favourite bands, have fun. I have no problem with that. It's when you insist that we're all "moaning minnies" for not wanting to be just like you that we start to disagree.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: tijuanatime
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:16 AM

To add to glueman's post of 7:50am:

The songs and tunes come first: in fact, ultimately, that's all there is. You wouldn't feel impelled to investigate the background of, say, "The Bonny Ship The Diamond" if it hadn't grabbed you as a song.

It could be said that Lloyd operated in reverse fashion: he arrived at a theory of folk music and then "found" the songs to fit it.

What glueman calls "the embedded historiographic approach" culminates in that preposterous expression "from the singing of". My own introductions rarely exceed ten words: if a song can't sell itself to an audience under its own steam then either I'm singing it badly or it's not worth singing in the first place.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 09:02 AM

"One of the stumbling blocks for a more widespread appraisal or consumption of traditional music is that the historiographic approach is so deeply embedded in the revival newcomers can find no way in"

Glueman, I don't accept this. Having loved folk for most of my adult life I was a newcomer to the semi-academic dimension of "the tradition" only a few years ago myself. I believe Crow Sister has similarly had a recent and powerful epiphany, and has often said she has been met with nothing but support and encouragement. I had the same experience.

I think that some people develop a kind of paranoid anti-intellectualism which results from their own insecurity - they perceive people who want to discuss things from an historiographic approach as somehow being "out to impress, with facts and figures and hoitytoity 'look at me, ain't I a clever muppet!' kind of stuff." Of course, it could just be that thse people want to talk about subjects that interest them, but the anti-intellectual resents this, and thinks that all such discussions are only trying to highlight their lack of knowledge. They interpret this as a lack of joy in the music. Well, every person I know who has researched traditional music does it precisely because it has inspired such deep love and passion in them. They are driven to learn more and to really iunderstand it. Just because they are not stood at the front of a festival marquee wearing a big goofy grin and glitter on their face does not mean they are not feeling great joy in the music. Lizzie often tells us we should not stifle her self-expression. I would equally ask her to respect my (and others') right to enjoy this music, which we love very much, on our own terms rather than on hers.

I'm not particularly interested in participating in an on-line fanzine. If that's what some wish to do, good luck to them. But I wish they wouldn't pitch a tantrum because other people choose to do things differently.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:59 AM

but there are also many in here who seek to turn the magic off and bring in Institutionalised Music which HAS to be appreciated in the correct way.

There you go again Lizzie - talking bollocks.

Lizzie you can say black is a colour and no-one will disagree. You can say white is a colour and again no-one will disagree.

When you say black is white people who know just a little bit about colours may tend to disagree with you.

In you statement above - there is not one iota of justification for what you have written - except in your own imagination.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:55 AM

I rest my case.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:53 AM

I have taught dyslexic students - in a letter-based discipline, law. If they wanted to learn the law, they had to come to it. It is not open to them to say that the words are a restriction. The law is words and written principles. Generally, with appropriate treatment, they managed, if they wanted to. Those who wanted to float in coloured wonderlands failed.

A close relative was "hyperactive". His mother taught him that he could not treat that as an excuse, but needed to take charge of his own life and find a way to manage it. He got a first in philosophy.

My current lodger has an IQ of 170 - and is dyslexic. Because he wants to, and is prepared to work at it, he can read computer manuals, digital recording device manuals, and make the gadgets work.

He doesn't treat dyslexia as an excuse for not getting to grips with a subject he needs to understand.

Similarly, dyslexia is not an excuse for accusing "professors" of stealing the music from the peasants. No-one is stopping the "peasants" from listening to or making the music, or understanding it, or learning where it came from. In almost every case anyone doing any such thing is welcomed by every other participant.

What many, however, object to is fallacious claptrap, rantings about ignorance being bliss, and a resentment that those who do know more do know more.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:47 AM

Oh, go on wij yer, Dave...I know you read it 'cos you luvs me! :0) LOL

Diane, do put a sock in it, there's a dear. My daughter's doing an OU degree at the moment, not because she *has* to, but because she wants to, she's always loved learning, apart from when she was at school. Children are born learning, the education 'system' is switching that off by demanding children learn only what they are told to, in the way they are 'supposed' to. Freedom in Education, and in The Appreciation of Music is wayyyy overdue.

Sensual 'darowyn Dave' yes, absolutely.

It doesn't matter HOW we love the music, only that we LOVE it in the first place. Each to their own.

Hey, there are many of us out here who have the magic, many in here too..but there are also many in here who seek to turn the magic off and bring in Institutionalised Music which HAS to be appreciated in the correct way.

There is NO *correct* way, just free range chickens running around clucking to the songs in the way they love best..

:0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:17 AM

Tell me, Dave...WHY, when I apparently write such "bollocks" do you bother to read it? Not only that, but WHY do you bother to read every single word of it, not just on this board, but on the BBC too?

Lizzie - you write tripe. I read it thoroughly so that I don't misquote you.

I read it in order to correct the misconceptions you insist on perpetuating.

I read it to see how stupid and misguided you can get.

I must admit you are getting better and better at that.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:11 AM

What I actually said was that it was wilfully ignorant for parents to remove children from school and lambast the entire education system just because they "didn't like school". Such educationally-deprived children, given the self-will and determination, could presumably seek out appropriate remedial help and GCSE tuition themselves later. That's as long as they are not imbued with inherited anti-intellectualism wrapped up in sparkly, rainbow-coloured froth.

Formal education is, as has been pointed out time after time, a discipline in learning how to use the brain, how to think and assess the scholarship of others and thus formulate one's own. As with any other field of learning, this applies equally to music which, actually, does NOT fall from the skies for "yokels" to pick up and not question its origins. How patronising. And far from the truth.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Gedi
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:11 AM

"I do the magic part....the songs whisk me away...and in no time at all, I'm away being that doxy, or pining for my Love..."

Lizzie, please don't make the mistake of thinking that you're alone in this. You're not the only one with an imagination, dyslexic or otherwise.

Ged

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Brian Peters
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:09 AM

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 08:02 AM

"He recommends a variety of strategies in Part Four of the book. Now why don't you adopt the one I suggested to you."

Because.....I don't *want* to. I'm perfectly happy with who I am, you're the one who isn't.

If I become you, who will become me? As the saying kinda goes...without the owls. :0)

"Adopt a strategy of not posting bollocks to message boards - you will find it a great help. And let me try and explain that so it comes through loud and clear. It does not mean not posting on message boards. It means not posting bollocks on message boards.
That's all."

Tell me, Dave...WHY, when I apparently write such "bollocks" do you bother to read it? Not only that, but WHY do you bother to read every single word of it, not just on this board, but on the BBC too?

Gotcha! ;0)

Ronald Davis was treated terribly by those who supposedly thought themselves better than him. He's developed a strategy to make letters sit still. I don't have that problem. The letters sit still, I don't. :0) Neither does my mind..it leaps around all over the place, and I love that it does. I'm happy being me. Really happy....and when I have the music playing in my earphones, well, that sends me 'somewhere else'...("if ONLY!" you all shriek) LOL

Just think on this though, not once has The Peasant told The Professors that she may feel that they write '.........s'.....so who has the better manners?

All I'm complaining about is the floodgates of academia that pour out, often stifling 'ordinary' conversation and putting the music into a very **serious** place.

I'm whizzing back to watch those Gorgeous Oysters again now...and bring a smile back to my face.. ;0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Darowyn
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 07:59 AM

As I drive my Honda Civic along the motorway, it is so much more deep and valuable an experience because I do it in the knowledge that Sochiro Honda's original design was a pedal assisted bicycle built in his shed.

Perhaps that is a reductio ad absurdum, to be professorial. However, the analogy holds because one of Lizzies arguments can be summed up in more academic language by saying that music of any kind can be appreciated as a sensual experience, with no knowledge of its prior origins.
If some find that the combination of both perceived pleasure and academic satisfaction is better, then good for them.
If others are happy with only one channel of pleasure, fine.
I'd just like to note that it is rarely Lizzie who descends into vulgar abuse.
Cheers
Dave

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 07:52 AM

Exactly, blowz...for you. That's what turns the colours on, for you.
And I don't have a problem with that.

What I do have a problem with, is those who look down their noses at others who have a different way of loving the songs. It doesn't mean that one is better than the other, it simply means we all love the songs, but in different ways.

I'm not out to impress, with facts and figures and hoitytoity 'look at me, ain't I a clever muppet!' kind of stuff. I simply love the songs, and if I interpret them differently, so what? It doesn't mean that I get any less enjoyment from them. It does seem to drive The Professors bats though.

Diane, thanks for the insult about my kids, ho hum, but my daughter could run rings around you, intelligence wise, at just 22. And my son, at 14, is well on his way there.

Nope, this thread was started because of the angst going on in Kate Rusby's thread about, shock, horror, a *mistake* having been made, which seemd to have reached the point of the guillotine being brought in to chop off the head of the person who DARED to make it.

I don't feel like that, it doesn't worry me. I just love the music.

Lizzie - The Happy Funny Bunny! :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 07:50 AM

The point isn't that additional contexts might not reward the reader-listener but that their absense doesn't automatically impoverish. One of the stumbling blocks for a more widespread appraisal or consumption of traditional music is that the historiographic approach is so deeply embedded in the revival newcomers can find no way in.

Fandom is perceived as especially suspect, whereas in other musics it has academic respectability.


http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/71/56

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 07:47 AM

Appreciating your own difficulties understanding what people have written might help.

I did NOT say it was a problem. I said it gives rise to problems. I have never met anyone who denies that, even Ronald Davis. In fact chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 of his book are labelled "Problems with Reading", "Spelling Problems" "Math Problems" and "Handwriting Problems". Take a look at your copy if you don't believe me. You do have a copy of this 288pp 34 chapter four part book - don't you?

He mentions a variety of strategies (it's part four) to overcome the problems that dyslexia gives rise to. All dyslexia specialists do. It's sorting the specific strategy to suit the specific person that makes them specialists.

The sub-title of his book you recommend is "Why some of the smartest people can't read and how they can learn".. Have you got to that bit yet? How did you get on?

He recommends a variety of strategies in Part Four of the book. Now why don't you adopt the one I suggested to you.

Adopt a strategy of not posting bollocks to message boards - you will find it a great help. And let me try and explain that so it comes through loud and clear.

It does not mean not posting on message boards. It means not posting bollocks on message boards.

That's all.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Brian Peters
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 07:46 AM

There are many examples apart from Bob Copper - as detailed by Fred, Jim and others - which expose the false dichotomy between "peasant" and "professor". I chose Bob deliberately, not just because he studied his family's singing tradition and described it with exceptional eloquence, not just because he was self-educated to a high degree of expertise on a variety of subjects from local architecture to blues music, not just because he was himself a collector who delighted in turning up different versions of songs he knew, and not just because he liked to describe himself with self-deprecating irony as a "peasant", but because singing was to him essentially about having a good time. His knowledge never compromised that, nor does it for all those other singers of old songs who have sufficient curiosity to want to know something about them.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,blowz at work
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 07:20 AM

I think as well, that if all that is seen is, to quote Lizzie:

"Colours, magic, sounds, words, skies, seas, fishermen, miners, bal maidens, weather, worry, hard times, good times, high times, low times, weddings, funerals, rivers, streams, tors and prisons, exiles and immigrants, tall ships and ploughs...YES!"

and you have no handle on when the song was written and how it came to be that we still have it now (ie when / how it came to be collected) then so much is lost from the song. I am reminded of 'The Bonnie Ship the Diamond' - a great song, I've always loved it and the pictures it creates. But, when I learnt, in an introduction, that it is known that the song was written before 18?? (I can't remember off the top of my head, sorry) because The Diamond was lost in the ice off Baffin Bay that year, it meant much more. (Someone will probably know far more than me about this, and I will probably learn that all that I was told is wrong!)

Someone found that information out because the song meant something to them - not because they were a boring academc, but because they cared enough about the song and the ships / characters in it, to want to know more. For me, rather than making songs dull, detail gives them colour and breathes life into them.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 07:16 AM

This anti-intellectualist garbage in relation to the "gift" of dysexia has all been spouted before, ad nauseum. Two very fine musicians, John Spiers and Colin Cotter each entered the fray describing their own forms of dyslexia and how, with minimal appropriate remedial treatment, overcame completely any vestige of learning difficulty and became outstandingly knowledgable and skilled in their fields.

Both, incidentally, are also Cambridge graduates in scientific subjects.

I wonder why the OP hasn't followed a similar route? Ah yes, I remember. She even hauled her own children out of school and deprived them of an education.If ever there was an example of wilful ignorance, this is it.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:54 AM

EVERY person with dyslexia will have a different magic. We are not all the same, some read well, some can't write, some have words that leap around, some miss them out entirely

Quite. There are many possible solutions, and there will be one that works for you if you pull your finger out and look for it. Have you even tried text-to-speech? Screen magnification? Coloured glasses? Getting somebody else to read to you?

You've written more words to Mudcat than there are in Lloyd's book, with no spelling mistakes or slips in grammar and less typos than I make. That suggests you don't have any problem in comprehension of text that you couldn't overcome if you put your mind to it. You just need to care enough about the songs, their creators and the world they came from to put the effort into understanding them.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:42 AM

"I don't *insist* you see it my way."

Oh, that's funny - I thought that's what this whiole thread is about, isn't it?

Who ever told you that you had to be interested in the academic side of folk? No one. You started this thread with a confrontational attack on academic interest in folk music, one of your many and wearisome hobby horses.

You love to wave your ignorance like a flag. Hurrah. Just don't insist that others do the same, or wave your flag right in people's faces too frequently, and everyone is happy. And then maybe we'll be spared another of these tedious, reverse-snobbery diatribes. Because christ on a bike, they are getting bloody boring.


Back OT: John Clare, the Peasant Poet. Wrote poems, many of which have been set to music at one time or another. Also was a folk song collector, visiting gypsy families like the Boswells and the Smiths to collect their songs. In the early 19th century. Not an academic, not middle class, but he was interested in the songs and where they came from. But hey, don't let yet another fact get in the way of a good rant.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:26 AM

Or indeed here: Ritual Turnip

Oops I seem to have missed several posts in my last reply there...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:23 AM

Lovely post Lizzie... I might disagree with you on many things, but the way you come out with stuff does mek me smile!

Ooh, and some excellent Ritual Turnips to be found amongst the savages to be observed capering about on the Isle of Man.. ;-)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:20 AM

"Dyslexia is not much of an excuse. Totally blind people read books on the scale of these two by using a scanner and OCR. "

Ohhhhhhh! Save me from The Professors! Totally blind people are NOT dyslexic. They simply do not see. The messages that carry the words to the brain don't go down the same paths as they do in the dyslexic brain. EVERY person with dyslexia will have a different magic. We are not all the same, some read well, some can't write, some have words that leap around, some miss them out entirely...but many of us go off at tangents and our minds are free range...We can't be controlled because even WE can't control our minds...but more than that, we don't WANT to do things 'your way', we're quite happy with 'our way' because it makes sense...to us. :0)

You adore facts, that's great. I love that you do. But don't *insist* that I have to as well. I love the music in a different way to you, that's all. I see music. Simple as that.   I don't *insist* you see it my way.

:0) The Peasant is as important as The Professor. :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:15 AM

The Snail. "Fred McCormick

"I've read this posting of Lizzie's about four times

Why?"

I though I might have been missing something.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:05 AM

You will also find, in that book, how Ronald talks of the many creative people who are dyslexic, musicians in particular. They 'see' *inside* the music, the know instinctively how to play an instrument, needing no music to show them the way.

Yeesh! The things I could teach you! ;0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:04 AM

Georges Denis Zimmermann, "Songs of Irish Rebellion: Irish Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs 1780-1900", Four Courts Press 1966/2002, ISBN 1-85182-629-7.

It's about twice as big as Lloyd's book but takes a similar approach; the central theme is that these songs are not homogeneous, but originated in several different ways with different intentions, with subsequent histories that went in many different directions. Zimmermann is an academic, but the idea that songs have specific histories is anything but an academic one in the Irish context - get the history of a song wrong and you can offend people enough to get your head kicked in. The specifically academic contribution was that Zimmermann was creating a big picture, telling a story that linked all the political songs of the Irish tradition into one vast sweep of narrative. You can learn a hell of a lot about Ireland that way.

Dyslexia is not much of an excuse. Totally blind people read books on the scale of these two by using a scanner and OCR.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:03 AM

Very good, Dave.

Sadly though, it shows me you have NO understanding at all. If you truly think that dyslexia is a 'problem' then you are living in the stone ages, and shouldn't be teaching dyslexic students at all, because...we have magic, not problems.

May I recommend, to both you and your wife...Ronald D. Davis's book 'The Gift of Dyslexia'....It may open up your mind...it's also written in very large print, short chapters and is easy for even me to take in and remember, mainly because Ronald is deeply dyslexic, was regarded as a 'savant' as a child, deeply abused by teachers who found him difficult to comprehend, with a mind that refused to be controlled by theirs.

Problems? Pah!   :0) :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:57 AM

Correct Lizzie, I did teach dyslexic students, not a specialism but part of my work with students who have learning differences. My wife does it as a specialism at a University. We still discuss it over dinner occasionally. Not the most riveting of conversation pieces for most people but hey ho - it suits us. I do appreciate your problems and possibly than better than most.

Most people with dyslexia, a well-known folk-singer/songwriter of whom you are a great fan; Jackie Stewart; Eddie Izzard; Steve Redgrave; Tom Cruise for example, have developed strategies for overcoming any problems their dyslexia gives them - difficulty in reading some things or difficulty in retention, for example. Dyslexia manifests itself in many different ways so there are a range of strategies needed.

One of those strategies is not to talk bollocks on message boards.

I recommend it to you.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: TheSnail
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:44 AM

Fred McCormick

I've read this posting of Lizzie's about four times

Why?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:39 AM

You see, you're doing it again....minutia...splitting the facts, the words in atoms....

"This is something which Lizzie don't understand, and I think, never will. "

Please read my post above where I say how much I DO understand that for some folks, facts bring in far more to the song. I understand how you think, but you refuse, or perhaps are simply unable, to understand how I think.

Colours, magic, sounds, words, skies, seas, fishermen, miners, bal maidens, weather, worry, hard times, good times, high times, low times, weddings, funerals, rivers, streams, tors and prisons, exiles and immigrants, tall ships and ploughs...YES!

Dates, titles, collectors names..NOPE!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:09 AM

"I'm not talking about 'traditional singers'....Lawdy! Lawdy!"

I've read this posting of Lizzie's about four times and I still can't make sense of it. If she's talking about the people who originally wrote the songs which we nowadays call folk songs, I suggest she takes a trawl through some of the songs in Denis Zimmerman's book on Irish political broadsides. (No I'm not going to get up from my desk on this sweltering hot day and dig out the title.)

Just on the score of peasant and pedant, Victorian/Edwardian collectors may have romantically described the people they collected from as peasants. However, the term peasantry means a system of near subsistence agriculture, whereby people rent pieces of land, and use money from the sales of the crops they grow almost exclusively to pay the rent.

The people Sharp and co. collected from were in the main agricultural wage labourers. IE., they worked the land for an employer in exchange for wages. In other words it would have been more accurate to describe them as a rural working class.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Bryn Pugh
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:08 AM

I think that Eliza's comments supra, and that of Dave Hanson (1st June 10.25 a.m.) says it all as far as Mad Lizzie is concerned.

For some of us, intellectual discussion on, and analysis of, the song, its provenance and history, enhances the enjoyment.

It certainly does and did for me, and I am in Jim Carroll's debt over this.

This is something which Lizzie don't understand, and I think, never will.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:00 AM

"Don't you think that it might have been more honest to supply us with this information at the start of this thread? If you have some sort of disability, I sympathise with you but that doesn't mean that everyone should automatically fall in line with you."

I've rabbitted on for years that I come from a dyslexic family. Pay attention at the back! ;0) Er...dyslexia is NOT a disability folks...Quite the opposite...It's absolute magic!

What is a disability is those who have brains that for some strange reason seem to have been disabled from hearing the beauty, without it being smothered in facts, and who demand that everyone knows every fact about every song, else they don't really 'love' the music.

Total rubbish.

I do the magic part....the songs whisk me away...and in no time at all, I'm away being that doxy, or pining for my Love...

I've just had the most ***amazing*** conversation with the surveyor who came to look at my house...but I need to start a new thread about it! Whoa, you are sooo not going to believe this! (she disappears off to tip tap like crazy)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:52 AM

"Lizzie, if you went away and read A.L. Lloyd's "Folk Song in England" ...

... several times, until you get it ...

... you would not make such a spectacle of yourself in public."

Hang on though, you've all been nattering away about A L Lloyd saying that you can't trust anything he said.

Which would probably have been fine with Lloyd himself.

This isn't about trusting an authority, it's about learning to think. Lloyd shows you some ways of thinking about folk songs which will lead you to understand things about those songs, and about the world they were created in and comment on, which you wouldn't have come up with by yourself. Of course there are mistakes - it was written 50 years ago - but it's a start, a first step which you seem very unwilling to take.

It's not at all difficult to read, either.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:32 AM

The dominant tradition within the revival works on the assumption songs are only appreciated fully by concerted study. Historiography is however only one means of consumption. There is no reason to suppose folk songs aren't defined by their immediacy or that traditional performances didn't draw upon general empathy to open out specific meanings.

You can in short, just dig the music and appreciate its antiquity. That the revival was rooted in specific intellectual positions and taken up by the educated middle classes does not mean the wider public cannot find equally valid ways of appreciating traditional songs, or should have that subjectivity undermined by a cadre of 'informed' arbiters of taste and understanding.

I find Lizzie's approach to folk music refreshing even while disagreeing with some of her conclusions.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:29 AM

"Besides, I fall asleep when I read, it goes with the dyslexic brain pattern..I also don't recall dates, people's names etc...they've always eluded me."

So YOU have a problem with "dates, people's names etc." Don't you think that it might have been more honest to supply us with this information at the start of this thread? If you have some sort of disability, I sympathise with you but that doesn't mean that everyone should automatically fall in line with you. That's like me denigrating other peoples' interest in sport because I happen to be knock-kneed and can't run as well as everyone else.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:29 AM

Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

From 1984 by George Orwell

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:06 AM

Great to hear someone's keeping up the traditions Lizzie... ;-)
A traditional ferret costume (Sans turnips..)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Mary Brennan
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:05 AM

Lizzie, you're not a peasant. You're middle class, as are most of the Guardians of the Tradition. The Tradition has its roots in the working classes.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:00 AM

I have my best ferret outfit on today. :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:30 AM

"While the first white fellas to see them might have considered the Motu ignorant, subsequent experience has taught us otherwise. That experience could be brought to bear on our understanding of peasants wear[ing] the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper[ing] around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?"

Aha Rowan, intriguing anthropological analogy. So you appear to be implying that there may perhaps be some approximation of 'meaning' and furthermore that those peasants even 'understood' themselves, the ancestral meaning contained in their naive attempts at song?
Interesting, though I'm more tempted by the theory posited below, that these hearty be-turnip'd rustics intuited their songs by direct animistic communion with the powers of nature...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:23 AM

"Lizzie, if you went away and read A.L. Lloyd's "Folk Song in England" ...

... several times, until you get it ...

... you would not make such a spectacle of yourself in public."


Hang on though, you've all been nattering away about A L Lloyd saying that you can't trust anything he said...Sheesh, make yer minds up. :0)

Besides, I fall asleep when I read, it goes with the dyslexic brain pattern..I also don't recall dates, people's names etc...they've always eluded me.

I can recall, a few years back, seeing a certain traditional group performing. Before every single song, out came the facts, who it was collected by, from whom, from where and when....It drove me bats..I wriggled and jiggled around, desperate just to hear the songs...

I appreciate that many in that audience would have gobbled up those facts, digested them and kept them for a meal later on, to be enjoyed and savoured.....but my brain spits it all out...My brain takes home the songs themselves, along with the colour of the sky, the gurgling rivers, the sheep in the fields, the fishermen, the soldiers, their loves, their losses...It takes home the emotions, the colours, the smells, the sounds.

When I leave a concert, I take home the film.

Facts jump out of my brain, replaced with pictures. I take home the ancestors themselves, sitting in their cottages and their pubs, telling their stories...

It's why I love listening to John Tams, because he paints those pictures around the facts, he 'rambles' on in his sweet way, knowing that all the while, he's teaching, teaching, laying down the colours for the films that follow.

Dave, you told me once that you've taught dyslexic students. Well, with all due respect, you don't really understand the dyslexic mind, because in so many of us, facts lie scattered on the floor, along with dates, names and times....whilst all around us are vibrant colours, scents, sounds and movements...all around us lie the 'inside' of the songs.

For me, the academic side comes wayyyyyyyy behind the beauty side.

I'd rather not tell you that what you're talking is complete ******, as you said to me, because I understand you love all that part of it.

I love the songs. Plain and simple.

But then...I'm a peasant, so the songs run through me and touch me in a very different way.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:14 AM

"I'm not talking about 'traditional singers'....Lawdy! Lawdy!"
You really need to decide what you are talking about - your foot-in-mouth is causing much confusion - not least in your own mind, it would appear.
"I'm talking about the kind of er...discussion that's going on in "Kate's thread"
Kate who - don't think you mean Kate Lee?
"do you really think the ploughboys would have cared a hoot about what AL did, or didn't,"
Don't know really - never met any ploughboys - did you? Come to think of it, Burns was a ploughboy, and a folk song collector- wonder how that fits in with your 'ignorant and disinterested peasant' philosophy! Lloyd and Williams' 'Penguin Book' has been a source of much pleasure and information down the years and, as Jack has already mentioned, 'Folk Song in England' did a tremendous job in fleshing out the subject - what's your problem???   
None of the source singers we met would have cared too much for what Kate Rusby did or didn't do - does that affect her singing?
Walter Pardon was a carpenter in North Norfolk; he was well-read and articulate, about his songs and was more articulate on the subject than anybody I have ever met - read what he had to say about singing and songs sometime.
Please can you tell us on what you base the 'ignorant and disinterested' picture of the traditional singer, on - I've never met one like that.
Personally I've never understood the insistence from some people that we remain ignorant about the music that takes up so much of our lives over the years - nobody is insisting that you go out and read a book so why should you insist that we all put our minds into neutral?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,eliza c
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:59 PM

good grief

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rowan
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:25 PM

Lots of curious comments in this thread but I thought the following was worth giving a response;
Didn't those peasants wear the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?

Ferrets weren't common in PNG (neither were turnips; I don't think either is present there yet) and so didn't appear in traditional PNG cultural expressions but their counterparts (pigs' teeth, bird plumage and various plant parts) certainly did. And the Motu could, up to a few years ago, recount the details of their ancestral lineages back for at least 1200 years, with some aspects corroborated by dating volcanic eruptions scientifically.

While the first white fellas to see them might have considered the Motu ignorant, subsequent experience has taught us otherwise. That experience could be brought to bear on our understanding of peasants wear[ing] the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper[ing] around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:07 PM

Lizzie, a number of people have pointed out that you are talking total bollocks as usual.

All of these people have spent time with traditional singers, source singers, song-carriers, call them what you will.

Do me a favour and tell them they don't know what they are talking about compared to your in-depth knowledge.

Go on Lizzie - I dare you.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:03 PM

I'm talking about those who FIRST sang the songs, in the FIRST place. After all, the first ever chap/chapess who hummed a tune, then put words to it, was the FIRST ever Singer Songwriter, who of course, The Professors sniff even more loudly over.

Once, the songs were sung because of joy, or heartbreak...They weren't analysed to the nth degree, dissected, dismembered, discussed...nor were the personalities who 'collected' the songs, because back then, they'd not been collected and put into museums, talked of in hallowed tones...they were just sung!

Those are the people I'm talking about, the ones who sung the songs for the sheer joy.

Lizzie, if you went away and read A.L. Lloyd's "Folk Song in England" ...

... several times, until you get it ...

... you would not make such a spectacle of yourself in public.

I would bet serious money that every single one of your idols has done exactly that.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 06:36 PM

Helllooeeee......

I'm not talking about 'traditional singers'....Lawdy! Lawdy!

I'm talking about those who FIRST sang the songs, in the FIRST place. After all, the first ever chap/chapess who hummed a tune, then put words to it, was the FIRST ever Singer Songwriter, who of course, The Professors sniff even more loudly over.

Once, the songs were sung because of joy, or heartbreak...They weren't analysed to the nth degree, dissected, dismembered, discussed...nor were the personalities who 'collected' the songs, because back then, they'd not been collected and put into museums, talked of in hallowed tones...they were just sung!

Those are the people I'm talking about, the ones who sung the songs for the sheer joy.

I know about Bob Copper and the others and I wasn't trying to insult them..heck I LOVED that documentary on Bob, the one made shortly before he died....

I'm talking about the kind of er...discussion that's going on in Kate's thread about A.L. Lloyd and co...I mean...at the end of the day, do you really think the ploughboys would have cared a hoot about what AL did, or didn't, do? No, they'd have just sung the songs and had done with it...

Probably
Possibly
Maybe

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 06:18 PM

Rifleman, d'you know "Flat Earth" by Patterson Jordan Dipper? If not, beg, steal or borrow a copy. You can't buy it any more for love nor money, more's the pity. Ralphie is assured his place in folk history on the back of this CD alone...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 03:45 PM

Well. I think I qualify as a performer!!!
Getting on for 40 years of it now!!!

ummm ...did anyone ever tell you that it's not the quantity of time spent, but the quality of time spent?

Get over yourself Ralphie!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 03:39 PM

"The "peasant" in the title of this thread just about sums up Lizzie's attitude to them - just needs the prefix "ignorant" in front of it to make it perfect."

Didn't those peasants wear the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 03:28 PM

"You never met Bob Copper, then."
"Or The Elliotts of Birtley"
"Or the Leggs."
Or Walter Pardon, Texas Gladden,Tom Lenihan, Mikeen McCarthy......
It is incredibly patronising and demeaning to suggest that traditional singers "just sang the songs - without giving a shit" The "peasant" in the title of this thread just about sums up Lizzie's attitude to them - just needs the prefix "ignorant" in front of it to make it perfect.
Around this area, up to the mid 20th century, singers were not only singing the old songs, but were still making up new ones about the events taking place at the time - 'The Rineen Ambush', 'Mac And Shanahan', 'The West Clare Railway', 'The Bobbed Hair', The Wreck of The Leon',' 'The Quilty Burning', 'The Quern Bay Disaster', 'The Drunken Bear'.... countless local songs. So not only did they understand the historical significance of the old songs, but they were recording their history in their songs - much of which would have been unimportant or 'inconvenient' to set down in any other way.
I would be interested to learn where Lizzie got her information about the 'unconcious' traditional singer - but won't hold my breath.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 02:37 PM

Lizzie Cornish. "...these songs were sung by people who didn't give a shite about the history of them..."

Brian Peters. "You never met Bob Copper, then."

Sorry, but that comment of Lizzie's has been bugging me ever since this thread started, and it goes way beyond Bob Copper's burgeoning knowledge. Traditional singers in fact seldom had a scholarly knowledge of the songs they sang. But as anyone who ever talked to Paddy Tunney or Willie Scott or Fred Jordan will realise, they invariably had a detailed understanding of the folk history of their surroundings, and the parts which songs played in that history.

A few examples:

- Betsy Whyte's comment at the end of Young Johnson (Child 88). The Muckle Sangs. Greentrax CDTRAX 9005
- A fascinating weekend which I once spent with Joe Rae of Bigholm in Ayrshire. What that man didn't know about Ayrshire, and about the songs he sang could have been written down on the back of a postage stamp.
- An equally fascinating morning spent with John Kennedy during which he talked in great detail about the songs and folkways of Culleybackey in Antrim.
- A five hour long interview which Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger conducted in 1964, and which I edited for Musical Traditions magazine. It can be read at http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/heaney.htm . Yes there are places in it where Heaney obviously feels pushed to come up with an answer, and the information he come out with is often inaccurate. But could someone who (in a different context), said the following, seriously be accused of not giving a shite about the history? "What I wanted to find out more than anything else was; why do people have to suffer? Why was there two acres of land and twenty five acres of rock? And why was there such a thing as somebody with a thousand acres to run their hounds and horses through the fields and collect their money after them? What did they do to deserve it? I suddenly hated the people who did it, you know, oh, the history...." And in case you think Joe Heaney was a one off, Connemara is replete with people who share just that kind of knowledge
- The huge amount of actuality material which MacColl and Seeger collected from the Elliotts of Birtley.
- The even more monumental collection of material which they recorded from The Stewarts of Blair. (Both sets of recordings are in the National Sound Archive, and in Ruskin College library of Oxford University by the way.)
- An interview between Harry Cox and Alan Lomax in which Harry talks with bitter eloquence about the game laws and about the treatment of poachers.

Traditional singers seldom retailed the kind of history you'd find in textbooks. But to accuse these people of not giving a shite about the history of the songs they sang is to demean their intelligence and to undervalue the importance of their artistry. It is in effect to accuse them of singing songs they could not have understood.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 11:37 AM

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:48 AM

was me of course. calling in from another computer.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 11:09 AM

Yes, Hanson, I see you and curmudgeon are drawing attention yourselves. Double troll alert!

A bit like the pot calling the kettle black isn't it?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Reinhard
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:56 AM

Thank you, Surreysinger. I just answered in a PM.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:48 AM

And - blatant plug - The Elliots of Birtley will feature in the first half of my radio show "Thank Goodness IT's Folk" this coming Friday morning.

Have a listen Lizzie.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:35 AM

"You never met Bob Copper, then."
"Or The Elliotts of Birtley"

Or the Leggs.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:25 AM

Lizzie Dripping, oops sorry, Cornish, starts threads like this to bring attention to herself, good or bad it doesn't matter it's about HER.

Dave H

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:16 AM

Reinhard: "I usually trust what I find in the respective album's sleeve notes. When I'm told that this is imprecise I will gladly amend it"

Yeah, and you're not alone. I'd imagine most people will tend to trust such statements made on recordings by professional folk artists. All the more reason why professional folk artists and telly producers etc. disseminating both the music and info. on the music, have a responsibility both to enthusiasts who buy their records and to the people who made those songs in the first place, to ensure their published information on the songs is accurate and up to date.

In view of the need to make amendments from time to time, you could include a clearly visible disclaimer somewhere on the page explaining precisely what you just have, and that information on some of the reproduced sleeve notes might be out of date in some instances? But as I said before, the sleevenotes you include describing these revival singers own responses to the songs and their history, make interesting reading.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Dave Sutherland
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 09:53 AM

"You never met Bob Copper, then."
Or The Elliotts of Birtley

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Morris-ey
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 09:43 AM

I quite like one of Lizzie's favourites: Professor John Tams - a great teacher according to Lizzie, but, thankfully he does not lecture...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 08:54 AM

I've PM'd Reinhard to apologise personally, and to discuss one or two other points. (Re the point made about it being a German site,incidentally, I hasten to add that this was intended to indicate that it had nothing to do with a Surrey folk arts impresario, which might have been inferred from it's name ... and nothing more than that). My apologies again.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:22 AM

> Your statement seems to imply that just because this is a German site it can't be any good. Thank you very much for your constructive criticism.

Sorry Reinhard - mea culpa - that was a very poor choice of words on my part. There was no implied criticism about the source of your site - purely an indication that, as with many other sites, the source of that song was wrongly attributed. (Mike Harding made a similar mistake on his Radio programme the other week). My apologies.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Brian Peters
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 05:31 AM

From the original post:

"How do you know that the songs collected by The Collectors are the original versions of the songs?"

We don't, and nobody ever said that they were. It's interesting to compare different versions, though.

"...these songs were sung by people who didn't give a shite about the history of them..."

You never met Bob Copper, then.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: theleveller
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 03:59 AM

As is usually the case in discussions like this, it's not a case of either/or. Traditional songs work on two levels: as songs and as social commentary . What brought me to the songs in the first place was the history behind them and I want to know the background of the songs I hear and sing.

Many contemporary singer/songwriters in the folk genre base their songs on historical events – often undertaking a great deal of research to get the details correct. It's what I do with many of the songs I write. Reg Meuross is particularly fascinated by the background to the 'story' songs he writes. For instance, we recently had a discussion about the nature of 'fustian' apropos the fustian coat that Dick wears in his song 'Lizzie Loved a Highwayman'. This led me to discover a now largely forgotten strike in Hebden Bridge, a fustian-weaving centre, that started in 1906, lasted over 2 years and had greater social implications than the Miners' Strike of the 1980s. Great material for a song.

Some friends of mine, the folk duo Brother Crow, write and perform wonderful songs often based on some of the murkier aspects of history from their native Weardale. At Ryedale Folk Weekend they gave a multimedia presentation based around their research into the background of some of their songs. It was absolutely fascinating (if, at times, harrowing) and brought the songs into even greater perspective. These guys are not 'professors'; they're fine musicians who want to know as much as possible about the background of their songs. Their research and the song they produced recently led to the restoration and rededication of a monument to a forgotten local hero, Tom Barton, who attempted to pull a child from a burning house.

Surely the whole point of folk songs is that they are more than just songs – they are our history, our roots, an oral history as seen from a different perspective to the educated classes who wrote the history book, and they deserve to be preserved as such.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Reinhard
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 01:49 AM

Surreysinger wrote:
See this link for Lucy's own words about the song. The site you have used is a German one, and like many others repeats the error regarding the actual collector.

Your statement seems to imply that just because this is a German site it can't be any good. Thank you very much for your constructive criticism.

My website is a fan website for a few revival singers, nothing more. I try to add a bit of information to the songs and I usually trust what I find in the respective album's sleeve notes. When I'm told that this is imprecise I will glady amend it as I did in this case. Thank you.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Anglo
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 12:27 AM

I'd like to bring this thread back to its beginning. Lizzie darling, you and I have never conversed before though through this forum I know of your love for certain pop-folk singers. I played your first KR cut linked on your very first post to see what you were espousing now, and heard a song plainly sung, with a bit of a Celtic Twilight feel in the mercifully sparse accompaniment. (I do not dislike, KR, I own a few of her CDs). But that paarticular song is that I missed when it was first written and recorded some 20 or so years ago, I believe, but it struck me with some immediacy when I heard the recording by Peta Webb & Ken Hall. THAT one forced me to sit up and listen to the words. KR's doesn't. And that for me is what folk music is about, professors or not.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 07:25 PM

> I hope that makes sense !
Certainly does!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 31 May 09 - 05:43 PM

How nice to see the massive support for the "roots" approach.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 May 09 - 05:15 PM

"However, dodgy site to choose for accurate information."

I'm sure you're right there. And again illustrates the continuence of misinformation, which no doubt abounds, and which - if your going to say anything at all, aught to be avoided.

Though the reason I linked, was specifically to illustrate how different revival singers have commented on the history of the same song, *and* also adapted it.

I used Poor Murdered Woman as an example, because I'm learning it and, and because I enjoyed reading Shirley Collins own response to the songs history. I hope that makes sense!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:15 PM

Sorry - you got your response in first there!! [grin]

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:15 PM

However, dodgy site to choose for accurate information. The song wasn't actually collected by Lucy Broadwood herself - it was submitted to her by the Rev Charles J Shebbeare, who was the actual collector, and then published in her collection "Traditional Songs and Carols". See this link for Lucy's own words about the song. The site you have used is a German one, and like many others repeats the error regarding the actual collector.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:09 PM

Yeah, I wondered if it might not be strictly 'traditional'. Though I've also seen some debate about that particular issue with known authorship.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:06 PM

Good song to choose, Crow Sister - based on a real event, newspaper clippings of the period available. Some might say not a traditional song exactly, as we know exactly who wrote it !

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:02 PM

For my own part, if anything, knowing the history of the song adds a dimension of intimacy which brings you closer to the err 'peasant' (as that's the term in the OP) origins of the song itself. Otherwise it's just a nice pretty girl or boy singing some oldy worldy sounding song.

In fact what can also be nice, is reading what different revival singers have to say about the same traditional song that they've each sung (one of the reasons I quite like to peruse the following website), and the way it affected them individually. Take for example one song I've started learning: Poor Murdered Woman The artists who recorded this song, are themselves interested in knowing and speaking about their responses to the history of the song, I found Shirley Collins sleeve notes especially interesting. Note also the variations listed.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: curmudgeon
Date: 31 May 09 - 03:41 PM

I don't think Terry was referring to this thread per se, but rather similar threads/Mudcat in general - Tom

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 31 May 09 - 03:38 PM

Well. I think I qualify as a performer!!!
Getting on for 40 years of it now!!!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 31 May 09 - 03:36 PM

"Each generation has their own influences. It's how tradition goes on, it's how it marches on. The music itself you can do whatever you want with it, it's very forgiving." - Norma Waterson, taken from Eliza Carthy's 'My Music' video - (see seperate thread)

Lizzie - Since that precisely cotradicts what you were saying at the start of this thread I stand by what I said. You talk round spherical objects.

Jim,

I take your point and you are right of course - it was a two way process. I was trying to emphasise that we didn't recognise the influence of broadsides in the past as much as we do now.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 03:27 PM

Looking at the names of those on this thread that I know, I'd have to say that the over 50% of them DO perform in one way or another Terry ... so I wonder who you're referring to?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Leadfingers
Date: 31 May 09 - 03:11 PM

I am firmly of the opinion that far too many of the people who post here , especially with regard to Traditional Music , would be TOTALLY at a loss at MOST Sessions and Sing arounds as they are NOT Performers , even at local club Floor singer level .


Especially the poeople who tell those of us who DO Qualify as performers what we should be doing !

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 31 May 09 - 02:59 PM

"An American Indian sun-dance or an Australian corroboree is an exciting spectacle for the uninitiated, but for one who understands something of the culture whence it springs it is a hundred fold more heart-moving. "
Lowry C Wimberly - introduction to Folklore In The English and Scottish Ballads.
Blowzabella says it all somewhat more succinctly.
There are many and various ways to enjoy folksong and singing other than the "there wasn't a dry seat in the house" one that Lizzie appears to favour.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 31 May 09 - 02:54 PM

I have to concur with Surreysinger on this one.
Lizzie. A question.
From which standpoint do you come from? Professorial or Peasant?
The nature of traditions is that they change relentlessly.
Just because you have come across a couple of "Rawk" bands that have adapted the traditional versions of songs to their own way of thinking, (and fair play to them, why not?), doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter as to the validity of other peoples interpretations of old songs/tunes.
As a musician, my feeling is that one can only shape the future when one has understood the past.
And everyone has their own way of dealing with that.
Jim Moray, Jon Boden, Ashley Hutchings, Martin Carthy....(Need I go on?)
They all have their take on the tradition, and move it on in their own direction.
As do I.
Lizzie, when you've learnt how to sing, or play a musical instrument, then you will deserve the right to comment on other peoples abilities, and their motives for what they do.
Until then. as Ivor Cutler once famously said................."Don't"

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 02:38 PM

> Personally, I think the time has come for The Peasants (of which I am one) to take the songs BACK from The Professors.

Lizzie,the songs have never gone away from the "peasants" or indeed the "rustics" which the collectors also spoke of. I'm mystified as to who these "professors" that you refer to are ... the likes of Jim Causley, who is intensely interested in the songs that he sings, and their backgrounds; Jim Moray (who Ruth referred to), who is also interested in the historical side, but then goes on to do very interesting and exciting things with the music, or current day researchers, most of whom are also singers and performers passionate about taking the music outside the spheres of academia? The breed that you're referring to really doesn't exist, and nor do the peasants (always a rather misleading term that the 19th century collectors used, for lack of a better term for the working class labourers that on the whole they tended to collect from)

> Long live The Bearers of the New Tradition, for they are taking the songs back to the people, maybe changed, but in A Living Breath.

A rather splendid sounding set of rather meaningless sentiments. Which new tradition would that be? The introduction of piano accompaniments in the late 19th century ? The use of the guitar as accompaniment from the mid- 20th century, or concertina round about the same time? The introduction of folk rock in the 1970's ? The songs have never gone away from the people ... they have _always_ been changed, even today (most singers I know use phrases from songs they like, introduce them to other versions of the song with a tune they prefer, or leave irrelevant verses out, or even choruses, so that the song is one that THEY feel comfortable with)... they get changed via the longstanding oral tradition, and current fashions. For instance, believe it or not, it wasn't the usual fashion in the 19th century to sing traditional songs to a guitar accompaniment - but these days we wouldn't necessarily view that as untoward

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Blowzabella
Date: 31 May 09 - 02:21 PM

Gosh, it's been a long time since I posted on here :)

I just wanted to say that, for me, I can enjoy hearing or learning a song much more if I know something about its context and the journey it has taken, to get to where it is when I hear it. I would also think that, from Lizzie's perspective, it would be invaluable - even if we don't know the name of the individual who wrote a particular song, knowing the period it came from throws light on what the creator(s) would have been concerned about or the mood of the 'peasants'.

Tangental but, I would have enjoyed doing Thomas Hardy much more, at school, if the historical context had been given to me (both as to when and why he was writing the books and the context of the periods they were set in) and I would have appreciated the books more if I'd been able to understand what the concerns of his characters were.      

For me, context is all - I'm afraid I rarely just enjoy a song or a piece of music without it. Maybe it's my loss ... dunno ...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 31 May 09 - 02:13 PM

Confused here.
Am I a Peasant or a Professor?
I don't mind which, I'd just like to know....
Only asking...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 31 May 09 - 02:06 PM

"We now know that much of the material we regard as "traditional" comes from broadsides."
Er....
With respect Dave - we know no such thing - broadside production was very much a two-way street, with publishers taking as much from the tradition as they put in.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 31 May 09 - 02:05 PM

I actually don't think that Lizzie understands.
Or indeed, ever will.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 31 May 09 - 02:01 PM

Indeed - I believe I was making exactly the same points just a few posts ago.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 31 May 09 - 01:54 PM

And?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 31 May 09 - 01:50 PM

"Each generation has their own influences. It's how tradition goes on, it's how it marches on. The music itself you can do whatever you want with it, it's very forgiving." - Norma Waterson, taken from Eliza Carthy's 'My Music' video - (see seperate thread)

:0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 31 May 09 - 01:38 PM

Bollocks indeed.

I've little I could add to what Ruth and Dave have said above, other than to point out the bleeding obvious. The OP invents some "flak" directed at kR in the thread about a C5 docco. Speaking personally, I was criticising the sloppy production and lack of research that allowed kR's mother to give erroneous attribution to a song. As a former telly researcher, I'd curl up in embarrassment if I'd let such a booboo through.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 31 May 09 - 01:14 PM

I get the impression that Kate is regarded poorly by The Traditionalists because she dares to change the songs around, chop bits out here and there, add other bits.

Lizzie - I do not know where you get this impression from.

Let me try and explain at least part of the process to you since you clearly do not fully understand it. We now know that much of the material we regard as "traditional" comes from broadsides. As they were carried orally around the country people remembered them wrongly, misheard words forgot verses and so on and different versions emerged.

There are lots of songs out there. If you go back to the originals as collected by Broadwood, Sharp, Baring-Gould etc. then you will find that more often than not what they collected were fragments, some large fragments, some small fragments, some complete, some telling slightly different stories.

What people who write song books do is often "collate" different versions to make a "singable version" and people who buy those books sing those "collated/singable" versions.

Fine examples of this are the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs - first published 1959 and from which lots of people sing songs, and Marrow Bones, another popular collection. I mention those two books in particular because someone who was well known to Mudcatters, did the research on the new versions of those books, tracing the original versions and singers. That was Malcolm Douglas.

He would fall into your definition of "professors" I suppose though in reality for the last few years of his life he was a Post Office sorter and before that an illustrator. What he did was carefully research what people wrote, said and did, and corrected obvious errors. He was keen to see things done correctly. That is all. He couldn't have cared less what people did with songs any more those people you have classified as "traditionalists" do, because they know that songs are constantly changing and evolving.

Most singers re-write songs, miss out verses, swap verses around.

The EFDSS magazine edited by Derek Schofield has a feature on this in each edition. The feature is called "The Singer and the Source".

The latest edition focusses on a song sung by Jon Boden and Bellowhead, "The Rigs of the Time" . The article gives the version sung by Jon; the original BBC recording from "Charger" Salmons ; other versions; who sings them; which verses and in what order. It has contemporary verses, written in the the style of the song from MArtin Carthy and from Maddy Prior and so on.

Why not join the society and see what they actually have to say instead of relying on your "impressions"?

Let me try and put this another way.

As usual you are talking bollocks.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 31 May 09 - 12:28 PM

"I get increasingly tired of the way people get forced into one or other positions."

Indeed, Jon. Most people I know who are interested in the history of songs, whether for their own personal edification or because of wider research interests, are able to enjoy a diverse variety of music - they just happen to have a context for the musics they enjoy. They also have great senses of humour and are a laugh to be around.

I think this polarisation is a figment of the imagination, personally. For example, although I love traditional and source singers, I also loved what Jim Moray did with Lucy Wan on Low Culture. But I also know that Jim Moray will not have created that arrangement without knowing exactly where the song comes from, and without having considered carefully its new setting. It's about respect, and the integrity of the music.

I sometimes hear a song from a revival singer and think, "I'd like to learn that." If I can, I find a source recording because I like to know how the singer first heard it, and which embellishments to the words or tune they may have put in themselves. But when it comes to how I sing it myself, I choose whichever bits of the tune or the words that I like best, and then I sing it in my own style, with my own embellishments. So this idea that having respect for the tradition equates to slavish devotion, or in fact is any kind of limit or constraint, is rubbish. IMHO, of course.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 31 May 09 - 11:58 AM

Maybe then Lizzie with some things. you read things that aren't really there.

Mudcat for example had existed for years with "just singers" and "song researchers" (and some bits of both) without (that I can think of) major disagreements in the topic area you seem to be raising.

I wouldn't suggest Americans and Canadians have not been without problems here or other places. I could reel you of a list like ghost, Janet, ttcm, Martin Gibson, etc.

Perhaps we do bite at different things but I think more to the point is whats been happening over the last couple of years seems to start with English groups and the English folk scene.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 31 May 09 - 11:46 AM

Nowt wrong with accurate information, Jon. What I'm saying is the 'seriousness' which surrounds English folk music, seems to me, something peculiar to us. I don't hear the Americans, Australians or Canadians getting their knickers in such a twist about their songs.
They seem so much more relaxed about it all.

I wish we could be more like them, that's all.

I think the sniffy pomposity so often seen here and elsewhere, puts a lot of folks off.


From Shimrod:

"Them perfessers dun't stop 'er thinking about that Seth Lakeman, though, do they, Garge?"

"No, they dun't Jethro - but the less said about that, the better - she moight be lisennin' loike!"

Very good, Shimmy. I chuckled hugely over your post. LOL :0) I don't 'think' about Seth though. Love his music, that's all. I'm old enough to be his Granny...maybe his Great Granny! Eek! I've just put 'Poor Man's Heaven' on to play though, as my daughter's away this weekend, so I can get to listen to it for a change, so thanks for reminding me about him...'The Hurlers' has just started..

Here, you can join in tapping your feet with me...Turn it up real loud though. :0)

Seth's 'The Hurlers' filmed at The Minack Theatre - Cornwall

The Hurlers themselves

Built by Rowena Cade and her gardener...The most AMAZING place! Two amazing people. If you've never seen it, SEE it! It's totally beautiful, set against the backdrop of a turquoise Cornish sea...
The Minack Theatre


Lizzie - Proud to be a Peasant :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 31 May 09 - 11:28 AM

I get increasingly tired of the way people get forced into one or other positions.

For the record, although my musical tastes do tend to take me towards the more traditional and away from "Dylan/contemporary protest" and try to do my best with a song or tune, I am one of the "find a set of words on the dt and sing it", types rather than a song researcher.

I did however learn a few things over here and they included Malcolm's comments on the shortcomings of copy pastes from unknown websites, problems with wrong attributions, etc. as well as becoming more and more aware of people who really do want to study a folk song in depth.

From my point of view (and from my side the folkinfo song database had this in mind to), there is no hassle in trying to provide accurate information. No, I'll go further, I believe whether a "grab any copy" like me or not, we should try to provide the correct information rather than repeat information known to be wrong..

If that makes me a professor, I apologise.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 31 May 09 - 10:46 AM

"many people are put OFF the songs that once used to belong to them because of how serious it's all become."
One of those threads based on "I treat folk music superficially so why can't everyone?" with the added rider - "I like Kate Rusby so why doesn't everyone?"
Any chance of leaving us to decide for ourselves how we draw pleasure from the music, and maybe even decide who we choose to listen to?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 31 May 09 - 10:35 AM

"'Ere, Garge, wot do you think o' that Lizzie Cornish, loike?"

"Well, Jethro, oi think she dun't much loike perfessers, loike."

"Why's that, then, Garge?"

"Well, Jethro, oi think it's because they moight make 'er think through 'er opinions, loike, afore she posts 'em on Mudcat, loike."

"An d'yer think that they moight make 'er think about the songs as well, Garge - where they came from an such?"

"You'm could be roight there, Jethro - carn't say as I blame 'er though - it makes my 'ead 'urt - but oi'm just a simple peasant, loike!"

"Them perfessers dun't stop 'er thinking about that Seth Lakeman, though, do they, Garge?"

"No, they dun't Jethro - but the less said about that, the better - she moight be lisennin' loike!"

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 31 May 09 - 10:01 AM

I think I understand that Kate Rusby is second generation folkie, raised in the tradition by her parents etc. It is unfortunate that the attribution of the Recruited Collier is incorrect. Given her upbringing, it seems to me such a mistake should not have been made and is even more difficult to swallow.

For myself, I want to know whether a song I enjoy is trad or merely folk-oid. I want to know the proper origins. I want to trace the evolution of a song through its permutations through different cultures and artists. I want to discover the kernel DNA that puts it into a time and place of inception.

If that makes me an elitist, then so be it.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 31 May 09 - 09:45 AM

Kate has said it herself, Pip. She talks about how she loves to do just that, and how it's frowned upon by some within the folk world.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Acorn4
Date: 31 May 09 - 09:38 AM

If we're being strict on teminology I'd argue with "peasants", who didn't really exist as such in the country after the enclosure movement, if we accept the views of the esteemed W.G.Hoskins

According to my father-in-law, peasants nowadays come from Luton, so who am I to argue?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 31 May 09 - 09:29 AM

I get the impression that Kate is regarded poorly by The Traditionalists because she dares to change the songs around, chop bits out here and there, add other bits..

I don't know where you got that impression from. The complaint that's made against Ms Rusby on that thread is that she referred to The Recruited Collier as a traditional song about miners. It's been known for several years that A. L. Lloyd adapted it from a poem (about a conscripted farm worker) by a dialect poet called Robert Anderson - then made out that he'd collected a local song of which Anderson's poem was an imperfect version.

This isn't about writing new songs or changing the old ones - it's about telling the truth.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 31 May 09 - 09:14 AM

You see, there you go again...instant sniffiness. :0)

Personally, I just feel it's far better that the more popular performers ARE taking those roots out to young people, rather than having them belittled because The Professors feel they're not doing it in the correct way.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: curmudgeon
Date: 31 May 09 - 08:56 AM

"Here's an intersting New Traditional song..."

Not a song, not traditional   - Troll alert #2.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 31 May 09 - 08:53 AM

Of course, the "peasants" were innocent, brainless creatures who found the songs in the fields and twittered them like birds ... possibly?

"'Ere, Garge were'd you larn that, there song that you sung in the pub larst noight?"

" Oi dun't roightly know, Jethro - oi carn't quoite remember - that sort of fell out 'o the sky, loike ... oi think ...?"

"Well that were roight good - pity oi'm too simple to properly appreeshate it, loike."

"Yeah we're proper thick 'corse we're jus' peasants, loike."

" Ah, mebe you'm be roight - perhaps in a 'undred years them thar perfessers 'ull appreeshate 'um more loike."

"Ahh - mebe."

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 May 09 - 08:34 AM

Some people might not care, but I *do* want to know the history of the song. It's what makes it so much more interesting to listen to and to sing. Plus while the people who created those songs might have been peasants, Kate certainly isn't one.
She can read and right as well as anyone I'm sure. And I suspect the only callouses on those hands are from playing instruments. I bet she can even read music quite well too!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 31 May 09 - 08:34 AM

Nope, it's not a 'troll alert' at all. What I'm trying to say is that many people are put OFF the songs that once used to belong to them because of how serious it's all become.

Yes, Tam, I agree, but...once again, we're back to the traditional world perhaps needing to take a step back, and look at themselves in a different way.

Yes, what they're doing, what they've done, is a good thing, but it's had repercussions. In making this world elitist, it has driven many away, and that, to me, isn't a good thing. To constantly snub the very artists who *are* bringing people back to folk music seems to be shooting yourself in the foot, isn't it?

Here's an intersting New Traditional song...

Sinead O'Connor - 'Famine'

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 31 May 09 - 08:26 AM

I thank KR for being one of the artists that led me to this music.

As for peasants to professors?

Since there are precious few peasants producing composing any more and even fewer preserving and conserving the past, I am even more grateful to those "academics" who do.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 May 09 - 08:23 AM

Isn't this just another thread about Kate Rusby? Sure looks like it to me..

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: curmudgeon
Date: 31 May 09 - 08:20 AM

Troll Alert!!

Subject: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 31 May 09 - 07:44 AM

Seeing the flak that Kate Rusby is now getting in this thread...

Kate Rusby - 'My Music'

....I was wondering how we got to this stage, in the English folk world.

HOW has a music once sung by the likes of ordinary people, The Peasants, if you want to call them that..how has it now become the 'precious treasure' of The Professors?

How has it become so controlled by those who demand that the correct history of the song is constantly given out, when these songs were sung by people who didn't give a shite about the history of them....They just SANG them, and I've no doubt that each time they were sung they were changed, notes here and there, words, intonation, etc...

Songs constantly change and evolve.

I get the impression that Kate is regarded poorly by The Traditionalists because she dares to change the songs around, chop bits out here and there, add other bits..

Is that really such a crime?

Is that not what has been going on for centuries?

How do you know that the songs collected by The Collectors are the original versions of the songs? They may have already changed a thousand fold by the time they stopped the process of that happening, in their saying "THIS is the way the song should be!"

Songs are sung by people. They are an expression of the individual, as much as the masses.

It saddens me that the English have surrounded the songs with Academia and Pedantics.

Personally, I think the time has come for The Peasants (of which I am one) to take the songs BACK from The Professors.

Long live The Bearers of the New Tradition, for they are taking the songs back to the people, maybe changed, but in A Living Breath.

Anyway, here's Kate with a song The Professors may approve of:

Kate Rusby - I Am Stretched On Your Grave