Is it Really Folk Music???

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Larry The Radio Guy
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 02:18 PM

Hey, isn't part of the 'job' in mudcat chats to get discussion happening?

Way to go Mr. Krinkle!

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Don Firth
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 01:56 PM

As I said above, I don't have to have experienced being hanged to sing "McPherson's Fareweel."

Or "Sam Hall," for that matter.

If that were the case, I don't think you'd hear either of these songs very often.......

I believe the problem with Mr. Krinkle is that he feels the only way he can stroke his own ego is to try to run everybody else down.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 01:48 PM

This isn't crass, Jim - personal preference is everything; it's about liberating individual musical experience from the fanciful & prescriptive generalisations of the revival and seeing things in their proper vernacular context. What is crass is not recognise how recorded Popular Music impacted on individuals as part wider growth and liberation that moved it on into the 20th Century when Tradition came simply to mean 'old fashioned'. For it is then that Folk began to flourish. I grew up in the Land of the Drone; I knew Traditional Northumbrian Pipers and Singer and Travellers and Storytellers who were digging all of other stuff as part of a much broader picture. To suggest anything else would be patronising, reactionary and absurd - three of Folk's defining features so why be surprised?

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 01:27 PM

"Jane Turriff had a fondness for Jimmie Rodgers though..."
And have a great fondness for Frank Sinatra and Maria Callas, but that doesn't make either of them 'folk'.
The sooner we get over the crass idea that discussing personal preferences has anything to do with how you recognise your music and define it, the sooner we'll start talking to each other.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 01:09 PM

The fact remains that 'the folk' recognised their songs as important to their lives - go and listen to Walter Pardon, Phoebe Smith, Harry Cox, Duncan Williamson, Sheila Stewart, Texas Gladden, Joe Heaney, Jane Turriff.... and the (all too few) others who have been asked to but their views of their culture on tape - half an hour of listening should do the trick

On this we agree, Jim, which is, I think, all that really matters. I tell you, if it was all so clear-cut thereafter I doubt I'd be half as interested. Jane Turriff had a fondness for Jimmie Rodgers though...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn2UTXDIDCA

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 01:02 PM

"Or don't the folks count any more?"
Of course they count - unfortunately a major medium of self-expression has disappeared and they have become recipents of a culture rather than creators of it, their role being usurped by the Gene Pitneys of the modern world.
Dismissing what they have created in the past by failing to recognise what it was or what function it served suggests that they have always been recipients.
By all means feel free to challenge conclusions that others have arrive at and replace them with your own, but you have always preferred pulling down what others have constructed rather than offering alternatives.
The fact remains that 'the folk' recognised their songs as important to their lives - go and listen to Walter Pardon, Phoebe Smith, Harry Cox, Duncan Williamson, Sheila Stewart, Texas Gladden, Joe Heaney, Jane Turriff.... and the (all too few) others who have been asked to but their views of their culture on tape - half an hour of listening should do the trick
"Is this one of those "folkier than thou" threads?"
Only if you take it as a discussion of values and personal folkie preferences, which it is not.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 12:53 PM

Monkey Junk
(:-( P)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Stan
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 12:48 PM

I personally have no problem at all if spotty Rodney from Burnage, who'd father is a doctor and whose mother has a degree in astro physics but now stays home to run the house, picks up a guitar and starts to sing 'the blues man'.

He might turn out to be good, he might turn out to be rubbish. No one stays the same for ever.

Say one person in every hundred who picks up the guitar turns out to be OK at it and one person in every hundred of those who get to be OK at it turn out to be very very good at it, somewhere along the line there will be a spotty little wannabe who turns out eventually to be even better than Sun House. (At least for some people)

Is it just possible that Sun House knew this and that's why he was so grumpy?

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 12:27 PM

With measured calm an otherwise irate Monica reached her car keys from the hook and said,"You know what your trouble is, don't you, Lawrence? You're a non-definer!" Then she was gone, slamming the door behind her. The second to last thing he ever heard of her was the tyres of her Range Rover crunching over the pebbles outside of the beach hut; the last thing was the CD of The Copper Family playing loud on her car stereo, fading into the silences of the gleaming dawn as she drove away.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 12:05 PM

I think this is an argument that's been going on ever since the Folkie thing started.
Isn't it?
(:-( 0)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: theleveller
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:57 AM

"and all the other establishment entertainers you non-definers would lump it with."

Oh Jim, I LOVE the term "non-definer". It has definite overtones of Levellers, Ranters, Diggers, Muggletonians and the whole world turned upside down.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: theleveller
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:45 AM

Ah well, as we say in Yorkshire "there's nowt so queer as folk".

That, no doubt, will be subject to various interesting interpretations.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:39 AM

*huggles*!
(:-(P)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:33 AM

As I recall it, the peasants (how our Henry always chooses the most emotive and least pleasant of the available descriptors) were quite willing and often pleased to pass on their songs, as well they should be.

So what does Henry propose as the best way to preserve them? Restrict the singing of them to those who are currently toiling and labouring in those areas of employment which first inspired the songs.

So that's all the following fucked:

Songs about:

Lords and Ladies
Jesters
Sailors before the mast
Cutpurses
Highwaymen
Imprisoned debtors
Ploughboys
Grooms
Ostlers
Blacksmiths
Boatwrights
Wheelrights
Wagonmakers
Candlemakers
etc. etc. etc.

Clever Henry. He has singlehandedly placed more restriction on the genre in a few ill considered, idiotic, sentences than licensing laws have managed in more than a decade.

What the hell is he doing on this forum, and more importantly, why are any of us bothering with his specious crap?

Don T.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: John on the Sunset Coast
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:27 AM

Is this one of those "folkier than thou" threads?
I think Shel Silverstein pretty much summed it up fifty years ago in "Folk Singer's Blues".

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:20 AM

Yeah, Jim - but most folks aren't Folkies, and most of the Music of the Folks sure ain't Folk Music. Or don't the folks count any more?

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:13 AM

Did Lee Atwater ever put out a CD or LP?
Do you know?
I've been pissed at Steve Cropper ever since.
(:-(/)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:13 AM

"....would be deeply insulted by the association."
Oh come oooooon.
Lancashire folk - Yorkshire folk, mining folk, cotton folk, Bolton folk, Clare folk..... now you really are talking utter bollocks
It's one of the most common self-descriptions we ever came across - any demeaning connotations are those put on it by outsiders.
Credit for the music created by the 'folk' starts and finishes with a recognition of its uniqueness and not constant attemts to lump it in with Gene Pitney, Elvis, Boyzone.... and all the other establishment entertainers you non-definers would lump it with.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:02 AM

you are attempting to deny the existence of a distinctive and identifiable body of song which has been acknowledged by every community we have ever worked in

No I'm not - I'm attempting to give it greater credit than has ever been accorded in the name of Folk to both the importance of the songs and the master craftswo/manship that made them. What I do musically has little or nothing to do with that (something we'll agree on at least).

And I'm sure when people say farming folk, it has nothing do with Folk as we know and love it on Mudcat. Certainly the farmer folk of my aquaintance would be deeply insulted by the association.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 11:00 AM

A great song can come from anywhere.
But the best come from real life. Your life.
(:-( ))=

Subject: Lyr Add: EDDYSTONE LIGHT
From: TheSnail
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 10:54 AM

My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night.
From this union there came three,
A porpoise and a porgy and the other was me.

Chorus: Yo, ho, ho, the wind blows free: oh, for a life on the rolling sea.

One night while I was a-trimmin' of the glim
And singin' a verse from the evening hymn,
A voice from the starboard shouted, "Ahoy!"
And there was my mother sittin' on a buoy.

"Oh, what has become of my children three?"
My mother then she asked of me
"One's in the circus as a talking fish
And the other was served in a chafing dish."

Then the phosphorus flashed in her seaweed hair;
I looked again, and my mother wasn't there.
A voice came echoing out of the night:
"To Hell with the keeper of the Eddystone Light!"

Clearly, I am the only person qualified to sing this song.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,funky junky monkey
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 10:48 AM

I guess by Mr Krinkle's definition, Bob Dylan should never have sung those songs, Johnny Cash should never have written Folsom Prison Blues (he was never in Prison), we would all have to visit a prison or homeless shelter to hear "true" folk songs(I sure hope they can write, play and sing), and I'll have to limit my song subjects to time spent wasted reading posts by a troll.

I've been raised to believe that you pay tribute to the past by remembering them, singing the old songs and respecting what they went through and lived for.
After all, don't we need musicians (who can write songs...) to put a tune to these stories in the first place? I wouldn't expect a General to write a moving song about war, but according to Mr. Krinkle, a soldier would be the only one qualified to so.

My Grandmother was an old hillbilly from southern Kentucky and raised 13 kids during the depression. She called all of the songs she sang folk songs because "they were stories of regular folk and were usually sung by regular folk - everyone knew them". I know there are many definitions of folk music, but I like this one about as good as any I've heard.

I'm as tired as anyone of hearing white bread yuppies sing "blues" in their Hawaiian shirts and birkenstock sandles, but you have to take the bad with the good I suppose. If you dont like them, don't listen to them.

You're right, I'd much rather hear a song about someone standing on a Georgia road watching someone else put down new asphalt...

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 10:45 AM

"Folk, alas, is a very different sort of word"
simple folk - fisher folk - farming folk..... you name it, it's used by all sorts of people to describe their own communities.
You and your 'baby-out-with-the-bathwater' mob are the ones who have applied connotations to the term in order to tear down what others have put up.
You are knocking down long out-of-date straw men of your own construction. Nobody is defending the mistakes of the pioneers who got a great deal wrong - you are attempting to deny the existence of a distinctive and identifiable body of song which has been acknowledged by every community we have ever worked in and - as usual - you are offering nothing to replace it.
The people you have made your persitant target have never claimed to have had "feck all with the creation of the music in the first place" - that is yet another target of your own making.
Whatever name you decide on - I'd stick with the 'bland' bit - it suits perfectly what you have to offer.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 10:25 AM

Ya' can't just talk the talk.
Ya' gotta walk the walk.
No brag. Just fact.
(:-( ))=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 09:45 AM

Patronizing the peasants.
Appropriating their songs.
For your amusement.
Shameful.
(:-(P)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 09:32 AM

Methinks we've been here before when you were wearing a different mask - I identify you as Lobby Ludd and claim my five pounds.

£5? You'll be lucky (Jim). No mask. I've petitioned Joe Offer for a name change on several grounds but this he continues to deny me. As Flann O'Brien pointed out in the common law a man may go by any name he so chooses. But of course, his heart ne'er changes!

Blandiver / Suibhne / Sedayne / Sean etc. It really is of little consequence.

As for the other business, I doubt either Dufay or Machaut was aware of their significance to the broader Tradition of Classical Music of which they were part, much less how their work would be revered in the centuries to come, but as far as the nature of their Tradition goes, they would have been aware of their mastery of it in terms of Ars Nova even if they never themselves used the term.

Folk, alas, is a very different sort of word - as you say it prescribes rather than describes and is used by those who had feck all with the creation of the music in the first place. It's an ideal, hatched, as you say, some 9 years after Victoria came to the throne so Victorian in every sense - and utterly, and shamefully bogus besides.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 09:18 AM

But, in the end, does anyone really give a shit?

On the whole I don't suppose the rank & file Folkies are too bothered with what amounts to a wholesale misappropriation of Working Class Culture for the pleasure & delectation of the more leisured classes in the name of 'revival' or 'preservation'. Personally, I think the old songs should have been allowed to die a dignified death, without suffering the indignities of taxidemy and reactionary ressurectionism - indeed, I've no doubt many of them did.

Even though I have been engaged & beguiled by such T&RR since I was 11, I think it pays to care enough to be bothered about such things, not only to give respect where respect is undoubtedly due, but to maybe enable a wider appreciation of the common heritage that is The Popular & Vernacular Traditional Songs and Ballads of the English Speaking World by those (Muggles?) for whom the very idea of Folk is, quite understandably, both risable & repellent in the extreme.

The bottom line is the old songs existed in their natural habitat without Folk; but Folk cannot exist without those songs. A similar relationship exists between sex and pornography.

I dream of cultural amnesty. How nice it would be to have a National Educational & Cultural Curriculum where Traditional Song & Ballad existed on a par with Chaucer and Shakespeare and had nothing to with 'the sort of music 'Catters like' or else the proprietary attitude many folkies seem to have to material which, in truth, they have only the most superficial relationship with & interest in. Such a relationship is counter-productive in the extreme, dimishing the value of of National Treasures by associating them with the MOR dross that mostly determines Folk Experience today. Even hardened Traddies operate at several removes from the primal sod, though (most) I meet are only too aware of this fact & deeply respectful as a consequence. For sure, the Folk Waters are muddied, and we're all guilty to a greater or lesser extent, but clarification remains a noble ideal - one that is, I think, worth striving for.

I love picking up pre-Folk books of British Ballads and seeing Sir Patrick Spens alongside Sir Richard Greenville's Last Fight.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 09:14 AM

Mmmmmmmmm.....
Very good.
Very, very good.
(:-(D)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 08:51 AM

"The whole concept of FOLK is a construct of a Victorian Paternalism"
No such thing - the word 'Folk' was first applied to culture by William Thoms in 1846 in an attempt to identify and categorise lore, custom, storytelling, painting, etc by the rural labouring classes.
Thoms and his contemporaries in no way attempted to examine the communities practicing these, but dealt with the subjects as artefacts, their identifying feature being that they were 'folk'.
The term was later applied to music, song and dance.
The fact remains, the people who performed the songs, identified them as belonging to their communities, even though the might have taken pleasure and even performed songs and music from outside.
"Not sure about that"
Be sure - or show us a reference of show that Haydn or his contemporaries referred to his music as 'classical'. The fact that the term was applied later makes not the slightest difference, and it says nothing, paternal or otherwise, about the people who created 'classical' music.
Methinks we've been here before when you were wearing a different mask - I identify you as Lobby Ludd and claim my five pounds.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 08:49 AM

Back in't day when folk were folk along came Henry Krinkle
his one remaining bloodshot eye still carried quite a twinkle
he cried 'eh-up lad, tha knows tha's not a sailor or a peasant,
so why yer singing that daft song, it really isn't pleasant'
but he were only waiting for a floor spot in't owd club,
and he only knew one song to sing, and ee wasn't very good.
He'd bin banned from most clubs 'ere about and for this were rather sore
but he sang as how he'd never play the Wild Rover, nay, no more.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 08:31 AM

Yes. They do. Some have cared enough to curse, namecall and insult.
While some have agreed with me.
If you didn't care, you wouldn't post.
(:-( ))=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: theleveller
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 08:19 AM

But, in the end, does anyone really give a shit?

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 08:08 AM

A parrot repeats but cannot comprehend.
A city dweller singing about picking cotton comprehends?
I don't think so.
Singing it with a grin on his face?
Somebody ought to slap the guitar out of his hands.
(:-( ))=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 07:34 AM

Nonsense - we have no idea what the 'folk' called what we (or some of us) refer to as folksong because, with a few honourable exceptions, nobody really bothered to ask them.

The whole concept of FOLK is a construct of a Victorian Paternalism that really believed God did make them high & lowly and order their estate.

Whatever they called them, most source singers, when questioned, differentiated between their 'folk' songs and the rest of their repertoire

Traditional Singers were canny enough to compliant to the wishes of their betters, but that's no surprise. It's a Bill & Ted situation. Such deference has been endemic since Fuedal times.

I'm sure Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven never called their music 'classical' but most people understand the word when it is mentioned

Not sure about that, but most musicians call their music something as part of their comminity & tradition. Folkies, for instance call their music Folk, which is exactly what it is, no problems there. I only get flustered when they call other people's music Folk too. A 60-something Social Worker getting up to sing Brigg Fair in her local folk club is very much Folk; Joseph Taylor singing the same song for Percy Grainger's wax cylinder in 1905 is something Very Different Indeed.

It pays, I think, to be clear about not so much what Folk is, but what it isn't.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 07:08 AM

That should of course read 'banana'
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 07:06 AM

"Those old songs, ballads, shanties & rants were never FOLK in the first instance, but only called FOLK by folkies "
Nonsense - we have no idea what the 'folk' called what we (or some of us) refer to as folksong because, with a few honourable exceptions, nobody really bothered to ask them.
Walter Pardon, the last of the big repertoire traditional English singers certainly called his songs 'folk' and went into long descriptions as to how they differed from 'music hall' or 'Victorian parlour songs' or 'early popular songs'.
Some singers called them 'traditional' or 'come-all-ye' - quite common in Ireland and among Irish communities all over the world. Others called them 'local' or Norfolk' or 'Traveller', or simply 'old'.
Whatever they called them, most source singers, when questioned, differentiated between their 'folk' songs and the rest of their repertoire - not a question of value judgement (as it often is among folkies), just a matter of being able to tell the difference between a anana and an apple, even though they are both 'fruit' and somebody can enjoy both.
I'm sure Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven never called their music 'classical' but most people understand the word when it is mentioned - what a pity so many people don't have a word for folk song - as they say in Ireland, "I'm sorry for your trouble".
OH dear!!
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 07:02 AM

I like that. I like that alot.
(:-( D)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 06:48 AM

This a hoot.

First Folk prescribes its own sources then continues to prescribe its own limits.

The bottom line has to be that Folk is that which aspires to represent that which it considers Traditional in terms of the limits of its own inner aesthetical / ideolological sense of musical righteousness.

Those old songs, ballads, shanties & rants were never FOLK in the first instance, but only called FOLK by folkies - a particular academic / social / cultural hobbysist elite operating at several demographic / historical & cultural removes from The Tradition they claim to revere (i.e. none of the present shanty crew have ever been hardened ship-board hardened tars who sang this stuff before mast in the 19th century).

Once we've established and accepted that then - yes, indeed, It Is Really Folk Music.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 06:41 AM

And he referred to the efforts of young white bluesmen(?)many times in interviews as monkey junk.
I'm not critcizing every folk song singer. Or bluesman(?).
But I seem to have made some folks angry and defensive.
Does the shoe fit?
Or may I acquit?
(:-( P)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 06:24 AM

A parrot repeats but cannot understand. Do you propose that a folk singer cannot understand?

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 06:04 AM

Like I said
A parrot.
(:-( D)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 05:58 AM

And make sure you read the accompanying info.
(:-( ))=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST,Stan
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 05:41 AM

Try this as a definition.

Folk music is an attempt to recreate the popular music of previous generations of your own or other cultures.

If this is the case then singing about working on a chain line in a country you never visited is folk music and singing about working in your own office is a parody of folk music.

If someone has already made this point I apologise. This thread has got a lot longer since I last read it.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 05:34 AM

I don't know how to do links here, but go to youtube. Search Son House Monkey Junk ...Watch the Son House interview. Not the white wannabe bluesmen (boys?) (:-( ))=

Subject: Lyr Add: OLD GREY SQUIRREL (Alfred Noyes)
From: GUEST, Sminky
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 05:22 AM

OLD GREY SQUIRREL?
(Alfred Noyes)

A great while ago there was a schoolboy
who lived in a cottage by the sea,
And the very first thing he could remember
was the rigging of the schooners by the quay.
He could watch 'em from his bedroom window
with the big cranes a-hauling out the freight,
And he used to dream of shipping as a sea-cook
and a-sailing for the Golden Gate.

He used to buy the yellow penny dreadfuls,
he'd read 'em where he fished for conger eels,
As he listened to the slapping of the water
the green and oily water round the keels,
There were trawlers with their shark-mouthed flatfish
and the nets a-hanging out to dry,
And the skate the skipper kept because he liked 'em
and the landsmen never knew which ones to fry.
There were brigantines with timber out of Norway
just oozing with the syrups of the pine,
There were rusty-dusty freighters out of Sunderland
and clippers of the Blue Cross Line.

To tumble down the hatch into a cabin
was better than the best of broken rules,
For the smell of 'em was like a Christmas dinner
and the feel of 'em was like a box of tools,
And before he went to sleep in the evenings
the last thing that he would ever see,
Was the sailormen a-dancing in the moonlight
by the capstan that stood beside the quay.

Now he's sitting on a high-stool in London,
the Golden Gate is far away,
For they caught him like a squirrel and they caged him,
now he's totting up accounts and turning grey,
And he'll never get to San Francisco
and the last thing that he will ever see,
Is the sailormen a-dancing in the moonlight
by the capstan that stands beside the quay.
To the tune of the old concertina
by the capstan that stands beside the quay.

Alfred Noyes, The Old Grey Squirrel

---

Set to music by Bob Zentz

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 04:27 AM

I realise this is a windup but, for what it's worth, a singer is like a storyteller; their job is to tell the story not live it - that's what life is for .

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 04:16 AM

A folk song singer is kind of like a parrot, right?
And Don, early, very early in my thread I stated that you should know who you are and where you came from. If you want to be authentic.
Or just keep putting on a cute and funny act.
(:-( ))=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Henry Krinkle
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 03:16 AM

Namecalling and insults.
Refuge of the weakminded ignoramus.
I quoted Son House.
I didn't put words in his mouth.
Howlin' Wolf didn't think much of white city kid blues players either.
(:-( P)=

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 03:00 AM

Krinkle demonstrates again that he is an ignoramus - ignorant of the basic difference between a folksinger and a folksong singer.

Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
From: Don Firth
Date: 23 Aug 12 - 02:44 AM

I can agree with you on that, Larry. During the early 1960s, there were a number of coffee houses here in Seattle that offered folk music as entertainment, and with the advent of the various popular "folk" groups such as the Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, the New Christy Minstrels, and of course solo singers such as Bob Gibson and Joan Baez, there were kids crawling out of the woodwork, teaching themselves enough guitar chords to get by, and learning songs off records. Some of them landed jobs in the coffee houses, and I'm afraid I have to say that the vast majority of them were pretty gawdawful. Most of them vanished from sight when the Beatles came along, the "British Invasion" started, and folk music was no longer pop music's "flavor of the month." But a few stuck around, learned what folk music was about, and got pretty good.

The big problem was that all too many of them didn't have a clue as to what they were singing about. They'd learned it from a record, and if they knew anything about the song at all, it was what they got off the liner notes—if any.

I had taken some voice lessons before I became interested in folk music. And when I decided I wanted to make a career of being a modern-day minstrel, I took more singing lessons—not to sound like an opera singer, but to be able to use my voice without doing the kind of damage to it that I knew could happen if you abuse your voice.

One of my teachers asked me to bring my guitar to the lessons, and after going through the routine of vocal exercises and voice technique, he would have me sing whatever song I was learning at the time. He would often stop me and ask, "What does that line mean?" Now, he knew what it meant, but he just wanted to make sure that I knew what it meant and wasn't just singing it by rote.

This got me into really researching the background of any song I sang, and making certain that I understood what it was all about. And could put that across to my audiences. And I think I think I learned how to do that pretty well.

Not that I'm so flamin' brilliant, I just had some good teachers along the line.

This is one of the reasons that I recommend that those interested in singing folk songs seriously don't shy away from taking a few lessons. It won't make them sound like an opera singer (I know a lot of aspiring opera singers who wish it was that easy, but it bloody-well isn't). They can teach you how to keep your singing voice healthy, AND you can never tell what other good things you might learn from a good teacher—such as, "What does that line mean?"

Don Firth