Can a pop song become traditional?

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 12 Sep 12 - 06:42 AM

And that was 300

Don T.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,veteran
Date: 17 Nov 14 - 01:20 PM

Who cares if it's folk or traditional or pop- if it's a good song, it's a good song. Threads like this run a severe risk of having to define your terms and none of us want that, do we?

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 17 Nov 14 - 01:45 PM

Of course popular songs have been taken up by folk singers and altered through the traditions of the folk process countless times. Paul Oliver and Abbott-Seroff are examples of people who have documented examples. I'll add a possible one that I've never seen anyone mention: the "Corn Shucking Time" that Jimmie Strothers knew was possibly influenced by the "Corn Shucking Time" that was used in His Honor The Barber.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST
Date: 17 Nov 14 - 01:55 PM

It's interesting that the two words should have grown to have such a distinction, since they originally meant the same thing, i.e. music of the people, which is pop(ular) from Latin and folk (volk) from German. And from Greek we have lay (laiko) music -- the music of the people, as opposed to the music of the church or the clergy. There may be others, borrowed from other languages, but those are all that I can think of offhand.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,Desi C
Date: 18 Nov 14 - 05:48 AM

Seems to be mostly down to interpretation. On one hand the glib answer would be the clue is the term 'POP' but in recent years in Folk Clubs I've heard songs my The Kinks, because many of their songs were about the London 60's fashion & culture be somewhat Folkyfied, in the folk sense of music being of the times and culture. perform a lot of Trad Irish songs, where trad usually related to old songs by anonymous writers. But again in rcent year songs snch as The Town I loved So Well, The Rare Auld Times, even Dirty Old town ( not even Irish or Anon) become regularly listed and referred to as trad. So is it down to age of the song or definition, or perhaps where, when and how it's sung??

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: cptsnapper
Date: 18 Nov 14 - 08:32 AM

I think that Eleanor Rigby might eventually be included in the traditional canon

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: ripov
Date: 18 Nov 14 - 05:16 PM

The point may have been made before, this is a long thread, but surely it depends as much on how you define "pop" as how you define "traditional" or "folk". Is it to be "popular"? Then most traditional tunes were - and remain - popular. That's why we keep playing and singing them. But ask a teenager if they like "pop" music; you will be told "No, I like rock/metal/rap/techno/ballads/indie"; "pop" appears to be used as a a derogatory term for all the (light? I don't know a word to describe the whole gamut - perhaps it IS "pop"!) music they dislike, and particularly for commercial products of the music industry (except the ones they like!).

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,Phil
Date: 18 Nov 14 - 06:59 PM

My own definitions have changed over the decades but at present I'd say yes.
Pop(ular) = Percent of market share. We keep charts. In America it's Billboard, Goldmine, etc.
Traditional = We have occasions. Happy Birthday; Land of Hope and Glory; The Bridal Chorus; Auld Lang Syne; For He's a Jolly Good Fellow. Going by sheer playcount and participation this probably the more 'popular' music.

In different days and times "Lay My Head Beneath a Rose" and "Danny Boy" were both pop sheet music hits and traditional funeral songs.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,jim bainbridge
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 06:00 AM

Just picking up this thread again and inviting vitriol from purists everywhere, I just found an old 'Collector EP with brief notes by Reg Hall.
The gist of his totes then was (and I doubt if he's changed his views 50 years later) that a pub singer giving full value to 'Lily of Laguna' in the public bar is a lot more interesting and meaningful than someone droning Child ballad number whatever it is in the folk club upstairs.
Academic study is fine, and most of us are very grateful for research into the tradition, but it's not real life, is it

I'm with Reg 100pc on this.....

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 07:08 AM

Despite what "folk is whatever I choose to say it is" folkies claim, virtually all the traditional singers we recorded over thirty-odd years were careful to differentiate between folk songs, pop songs, country and western songs.... and traditional songs, even to the extent of having their own identifying name for them.
Of course - they might have got it all wrong!!
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 07:11 AM

Meant to add that the chance of a modern pop song becoming traditional in virtually non-existent as composers carefully place a (c) next to them to make sure they don't
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 07:29 AM

"a pub singer giving full value to 'Lily of Laguna' in the public bar is a lot more interesting and meaningful than someone droning Child ballad number whatever it is in the folk club upstairs."

A comparison so loaded as to be useless. What if I were to reverse that bias and ask you to choose between a vibrant, committed performance of 'My Son David', 'Henry Martin, or 'Tiftie's Annie' in the room upstairs, versus a drunk in the bar bawling an out-of-tune rendition of some music hall song or other?

Incidentally, where exactly are these public bars where people sing 'Lily of Laguna'?

There's my bit of purist vitriol.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Larry The Radio Guy
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 08:49 AM

I had forgotten I had started this post 3 1/2 years ago. If it hadn't been 'written down' with my name on it, I'd have sworn it was traditional.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 09:14 AM

I'd have sworn it was traditional."
Sorry Larry - isn't that what's being discussed?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Lighter
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 09:56 AM

I concur with Brian.

But part of the whole problem (if that's what it is) is that "Traditional" doesn't mean "traditional."

"The Star Spangled Banner" is "traditional" in the everyday sense: it's been around a long, long time, and people still sing it, especially on certain occasions (as before major-league baseball games).

But capital-T "Traditional" means having some age, but it also means having notable variations in text and/or tune, and no recognized standard version.

A folkie chestnut like "Tom Dooley," of course, can be both. In one sense, the song was traditional because it had a long, if geographically limited, existence in various versions with no "standardized" text or tune. Once it became a copyrighted revival hit, text, tune, and timing (and to some extent instrumentation: who plays it on the piano?)became essentially frozen. Those who know the song see any variations in performance as mere variations from a well-established norm. The copyrighted "Tom Dooley" is "Traditional" only by special pleading, even if it has "Traditional" roots.

One-word labels with no context or elaboration are notoriously misleading.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 10:14 AM

"The Star Spangled Banner" is "traditional" in the everyday sense: it's been around a long"
"Traditional" when applied to music has a specific meaning in the same way "classical" does - though both terms can have other meanings whe applied elsewhere.
Traditional in our sense refers to a process of transmission, remaking - nothing to do with how long it has been around.
Irish Travellers were still making traditional songs in the 1970s which were being absorbed into the communities, changed and adapted and in a relatively short time, becoming anonymous -
The Star Spangled Banner was written by Francis Scott Key in 1812 and has basically remained the same.
Should parodies of it b made, become accepted and be absorbed into the communities, they might be described as being 'traditional'
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,jim bainbridge
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 11:18 AM

Just concurring with the views of Reg Hall, an early stalwart of the tradition- re- 'Lily of Laguna', the views I mentioned were expressed 50 years ago- if it's a good song, who cares if it is traditional or not- you lot can't even define it and PLEASE DON'T TRY!!!
Tell you what, given the choice of your two examples Brian, although I'd rather hear 'Lily of Laguna' sung well, I'd go for the drunk in the bar- the Child ballads are an important body of work but the chances of anyone giving a meaningful and sympathetic delivery of a Child ballad in 2015 are slim (at least 50 years ago there was a real possibility of hearing ballads in a social context)
There's always an exception of course delivered vibrantly to what is after all a tiny minority of the population- ie folkies)...
but such material is far better left to the academics these days I think.

It's maybe regrettable but that's the real world- 'folk music' is supposed to be for the folk after all- why do we put up these pointless barriers? -just off to the pub (where the folk spend time)- will probably do some Delia Murphy songs.
And in my experience, traditional singers never differentiated between these alleged 'genres' of music- they didn't know they were singing folk songs till song collector TOLD them & put all their songs in tidy little slots!

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Lighter
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 12:31 PM

> you lot can't even define it and PLEASE DON'T TRY!!!

If there's a desire to discuss it intelligently, one can define anything.

The kind of music that interests people like Jim and Steve and me and some others is undeniably real and, in various ways and shifting degrees, different from other kinds of music. Not so different as an apple from an orange, but different.

Anyway, illuminating discussions of "folk music" don't founder on slapping labels on things. If Mr. X calls "Finnegan's Wake" a "folk song" and Ms. Y doesn't, they can still talk intelligently about "Finnegan's Wake." Or they can wrangle pointlessly.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 01:23 PM

"PLEASE DON'T TRY!!! "
Why not?
Lily of Laguna is a British coon song, a love song that originally included a racist and stereotyped image of black people. It was written in 1898 by English composer Leslie Stuart.
Not a folk song, however popular it was.
Reg's comments were on taste, nnot on definition - à chacun son goût ( "to each his own taste").
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 01:32 PM

Here's one for you, Jim.
In the 40s and 50s, even into the 60s a well-loved pub song at the time, if somewhat racist, was 'My Brother Sylvest'. It apparently had many outings during the Sods' Operas of WWII and existed in a variety of versions. Nobody could remember where it came from, how old it was or who wrote it, not that they cared anyway. Could that have been in any way a 'Traditional' or 'folk' song? I don't want to get involved yet again in these pointless arguments but still would be curious to see what you think.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 04:46 PM

Mike Harding used to sing My Brother Sylvest in folk clubs. Makes it a folk song by at least one definition.

Bob Dylan songs that charted are pop songs on Radio 2 in the day and folk songs on Radio 2 on a Wednesday evening.

Songs written by Richard Thompson (usually genred pop or rock on iTunes and Amazon) appear on websites of traditional Irish songs, ditto many MacColl songs.

No such thing as pop. No such thing as folk. It's all music. Jim Carroll likes it to get old men warbling out of tune pretending they learned it at their mother's knee and many American mudcatters think you had to sit cross legged with a flower in your hair forty eight years ago to call it folk.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,Guest
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 05:46 PM

No such thing as Football,Cricket, Rugby, Baseball, Basketball,etc it's all sport, Football supporters are just narrow minded bigots.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 07:22 PM

"Makes it a folk song by at least one definition. W
So if someone gets up i a fol;k club and sings Puccini's Nessun Dorma it becomes a folk song - or when opera singer Kiri ti Kanawa sings Wouldn't it be Luverly, it becomes opera??
Silly definition - is it actually documented anywhere?
Bob Davenport used to sing Kurt Weill's,and Maxwell Anderson's September Song' at folk clubs ( basically to get up the noses of us "purists" I suspect) - a folk song - I don't think so.
Really don't know enough about My Brother Sylvest to comment - don't think there are hard and fast rules on individual songs - there are certainly borderline cases, but not, I suggest, among modern pop songs, for the reason I mentioned.
The point I am making about these songs is basically if you are going to understand them we need to be fairly specific on what we mean - they carry far too much historical and cultural baggage to just abandon an existing and well documented definition and not replace it with something we can all (in general terms) agree upon.
The present definition has never been seriously challenged - it certainly has never been replaced.
What has happen is that the a small number of people have decided that the terms 'folk' and 'tradition' have proved inconvenient to their particular interests and ambitions and have decided to hang their own particular flavour-of-the-month on a hook that has been occupied for well over a century and a half, without having the courtesy to explain why, other than "folk/tradition is what I choose to call it".   
It's far too important an art/cultural form to allow that to happen without a fight.
Sing what you want, but if you have any respect for the music, at least try to understand it, or allow those of us to wish to to do so without abusive terms like "purist" or "finger-in-ear" or "
"folk police" or even "folk fascist".
I think I know what folk/traditional song is - have spent over half a century trying to come to terms with it.
I out experience, the older source singers knew that the songs I believe to be folk/traditional were unique and had their own terms to describe what they sang.
If they were, I am wrong fine - show us where they/I am are and I'll make arrangements to pack of our large library of books on the folksong, ballads, folklore, music, dance tales, superstitions... (all related disciplines)   to Oxfam and fill the shelves with commended alternative - so far, nobody has come up with zilch.
Not very convincing.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Larry The Radio Guy
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 08:01 PM

Sorry about my rather 'fuzzy' (is that the right word?) joke, Jim.   What I was trying to imply was that because I forgot that I had started this thread (i.e. the author), and years later people are still discussing it, maybe it's entered the 'oral tradition'....and now this thread meets at least some of the criteria of traditional.   Yeah....I know.   Not really all that funny..

But onto the discussion: I have a lot of respect for Jim Carroll's point of view here.   I think that any genre of music has to have some kind of defining features.   I also think that it's always valuable to keep discussing them, as you see how defining features change over the years.

For the longest time I was always fighting with the use of the word "cover version".....since I knew it's origin.   And the fact that now it's used to describe any song anybody sings that the singer didn't write (or wasn't written specifically for that singer)......drove me crazy. Now I just find it irritating, and I no longer go off on long discourses.

So I have to accept that the term has changed.

Maybe that's happened with 'folk music'.

But I haven't really heard any compelling arguments within this thread to suggest that 'traditional' as a category is really any different today than it ever was.

I think "Happy Birthday" and "Old MacDonald had a Farm" are traditional. So are those ballads that Jim and other folklorists have collected and annotated.

Eleanor Rigby?   Everybody knows it's a Beatles song.   Six Days on the Road?   Lots of variants, it's true.....but most people think of one specific recording (whether it's Dave Dudley or Taj Mahal or Colleen Peterson) when they hear or sing it.

Anyway.......I really don't know much about traditional music, but those are my thoughts.   For now, anyway (until they change....but then, that's part of the 'tradition').

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,Ripov
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 08:17 PM

>Last Guest
Couldn't agree more. Just as in music, while there are dedicated amateurs keeping the individual forms of sport (1954 definition) alive (even if they have the occasional disagreement), the bulk of it , just like the music industry, is simply a way of getting bums on seats and so increase the industry's profits. But at least the music industry is honest about the fact that it's only show business.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,ripov
Date: 15 Nov 15 - 08:23 PM

that is "amateurs" in the sense that they have a deep love of their subject.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 03:12 AM

Rugby league or rugby union?

Two inning matches, one day or 20/20?

The London Philharmonic Orchestra with a Vaughan Williams collection or John Connolly singing his Fiddler's Green?

Joan Baez singing Geordie or U2 playing Bloody Sunday?

Elvis Costello singing Veronica at a punk venue or singing Veronica when he supported MacColl and Seeger?

Sadly, nobody has the copyright on the word folk any more than the word music. 1954 was a year when a lot happened but nothing of note in committees set up to analyse music. Many pop, rock, blues etc songs relate a moment in time or reflect a community and its people. Many traditional songs are about the same.

Shagging, unrequited shagging and dying from cannonball wishing you were shagging.

We call it song, regardless.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 03:53 AM

"So I have to accept that the term has changed."
Then you have to define what it has changed into so we can continue to discuss it.
I have hundreds of books labelled "folk" or "tradition" going back to the beginning of the twentieth century and beyond, dealing with a specific and identifiable type of song (and related cultures and activities).
I have dedicated half a century listening to singing, studying and researching that specific type of music - thirty years of that time was spent finding old singers, recording their songs and interviewing them on how those songs fitted into their lives.
That time has only confirmed in my mind the idea I first started out with - that there is a unique body of song and music, that it held a unique place in the lives of people and communities and that they claimed it as "ours" (Irish, Traveller, Norfolk... wherever) something they can never claim about music that was manufactured and copyrighted by a business to be sold.
It's not the repetition or the alteration or the like or dislike that makes it traditional - it's role within the communities it served and almost certainly where it originated.
If the terms used to identify that music no longer serves because they have been replaced by other types of music, then you have to say why that is - you have to re-define the term.
Bert Lloyd summed it up perfectly way back in 1967 when he wrote "If Little Boxes and The Red Flag are folk songs, then we need a new term to describe The Outlandish Knight, Searching for Lambs and The Coalowner and the Pitman's Wife".
I suggest that the length of time the terms have been in use, the amount of research that has gon into the subject and the century or so of published material making use of the terms 'folk' and 'traditional', it is far, far too late to rename our music now - the term is too well defined for that.
It's not as if these changes you claim to have taken place have happened because the public have taken them up and re-applied them They are not terms in general use in any shape or form when applied to music - we have failed miserably to involve the broad mass of people in our music.
These changes are being demanded by a tiny number of self-interested people who lack either energy or imagination to think of a name or definition of unrelated music that catches their fancy - and even they are not agreed on what that new definition is.
The term(s) are now a a convenient cultural catchall to suit people who don't necessarily like folk or traditional music but find the term handy for their own particular ambitions and interests.
That is not how language evolves - it is not evolution but self-serving manipulation.
One of the features of traditional/folk music is that it has bee ruled to be in the public domain - try tellin the copyright holders of Eleanor Rigby that it belongs to us all and wait for the waterfall of legal writs to come showering through your letterbox.
What do you suggest - that folk song be taken out of the public domain and be subject to copyright, as are Beatles songs?
I'd have thought that folk music proper has enough problems to cope with if it is to survive.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,guest
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 04:02 AM

I'm sorry guest I'm missing your point or you're missing mine.If you paid £30 or £40 pound to see a football match would you be just as happy if 13 or 15 lads came out with an oval ball ?

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 05:37 AM

"Sadly, nobody has the copyright on the word folk"
Probably the least convincing and irrational argument of all times
Language is what it is because of usage and track record - it's how we communicate.
If I bought a tin labeled 'salmon' and go home to find it was full of butterbeans because John Wests had decided salmon wasn't making enough profit, I would be entitled to go back and complain and, if doing so had caused me time and expense, some recompense (after all, the word "salmon" isn't copyrighted
If they persisted, I would be entitled to sue them.
The misuse of existing words is usually down to ignorance and often stupidity.
The deliberate use of words in order to push your own interest or product is simply dishonest and often dealt with through the Trades Description Act.
If you have something to give or sell you are morally obliged to describe accurately what it is.
Your argument is simply dishonest cultural vandalism - "I will call my music "folk music" because it suits me to do so - it doesn't matter how it affects the recipient.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,Phil
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 08:02 AM

"If you paid £30 or £40 pound to see a football match would you be just as happy if 13 or 15 lads came out with an oval ball?"

"If I bought a tin labeled 'salmon' and go home to find it was full of butterbeans because John Wests had decided salmon wasn't making enough profit, I would be entitled to go back and complain and, if doing so had caused me time and expense, some recompense (after all, the word "salmon" isn't copyrighted
If they persisted, I would be entitled to sue them.

'I think I know what folk/traditional song is - have spent over half a century trying to come to terms with it."

There is damn little traditional "calypso" on history's first and only million seller calypso album (Calypso, Belafonte, RCA LPM-1248, 1957.) And there were hundreds of other artists and songs from around the globe that self-defined as "calypso." Yet I don't know a single university professor of West Indian music who doesn't insist on hewing to a rigid, dictionary definition of calypso as Trinidadian folk.

In the half-century of my own research I've found academic, textbook and/or Mudcat definitions are about as relevant as pocket lint to the overwhelming majority of music makers and consumers (and fwiw, the true history of caribbean pop/folk music.) No refund, no return.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 08:20 AM

"as relevant as pocket lint"
I assume you have come up with an alternative of your own - or somebody else s?
I await with interest.
If not, I'll stick with what I've got.
You calypso analogy is fairly irrelevant
That the pop industry was prepared not to include calypso to sell their product is surely the point - commercial enterprises do that sort of thing all the time
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 09:43 AM

Jim,
I like your answer to my question about 'Sylvest'. Respect.

I am with you 99% of the way for what it's worth. Almost all of us interested in any way in traditional folk music know pretty precisely what we are talking about when we discuss it and your 'definition' of this would probably fit my definition like a glove.

BUT it didn't do King Cnut any good telling the tide to go back. 'Folk Music' has come to have a much wider accepted meaning over the last 50 years and this doesn't need to have a definition. Like other genres of music it is a broad umbrella. I can live with this.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Lighter
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 09:59 AM

> I can live with this.

Me too. The issue, however, is that some people not only insist that the term "folk music" has no real meaning; they also want us to believe them.

The ballgame analogy is an excellent one. Not perfect, but excellent.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,jim bainbridge
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 11:03 AM

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST,jim bainbridge
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 11:17 AM

sorry- firing blanks again....

My question really was about whether a definition is necessary- we all think we know what folk/traditional music is & while we can try & define it, my feeling is that it's a style rather than a repertoire- I remember a recording of travellers at a campfire singing 'I'll never forget my blue eyes' long before I heard Johnny Cash singing it, and Jack Elliott's. brother Reece was singing 'Sylvest' at the Birtley club in the mid-sixties.

I I've never gone out of my way to upset purists ear-fingerers or anyone really but if otherwise perceptive people reject a song because it's not 'folk' or 'traditional' they are missing a hell of a lot, just like Cecil Sharp, who rejected material for different, but equally blinkered reasons....

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 11:19 AM

Of course, King Cnut didn't want the tide to go back. What he was actually doing was demonstrating to his flattering courtiers the limitations of even a king's power, by making them get their feet wet -- an exemplar of rightness rather than of vanity. My late first wife Valerie put it rather well in one of her books: she wrote, "History has given Canute the wrong footnote."

So I agree with Steve's analogy. We are, alas, not going to stop them saying "folk" so promiscuously about things that we know are nothing of the sort, much as we would love to do.

≈M≈

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 11:38 AM

"I've never gone out of my way to upset purists ear-fingerers or anyone really"
Sorry Jim, but I find "inviting vitriol from purists" pretty offensive - the term itself is pretty offensive - sort of like calling the man who asks for salmon and is given butterbeans a pedant -after all, it's all food!!
Nobody "rejects" any form of music - our collection ranges from Maria Callas to Frank Sinatra, some opera, blues, jazz 1930s swing, music hall... an extremely catholic collection.   
The fact that we don't accept a type of music as traditional doesn't mean we don't listen to it or like it.
I actively don't like modern pop for all sorts of reasons not relevant here, but that's about it.
THere is nothing whatever blinkered about either not counting music as traditional or even disliking some music - that's called "taste" and it is somewhat arrogant to suggest that there is something wrong with us because we all don't like that same things.
One of the best singers we ever recorded was a blind Irish Travelling woman with a repertoire of somewhere between 100 and 200 traditional songs (never managed to record them all)
She could have doubled the number of songs she gave us with her Country and Western songs but despite our requests for her to sing them, she refused saying "they're not what you want - I only ing them 'cause they're what the lads ask for down the pub".
In the five years we knew her she refused to sing one of them, though it was very much a part of what we did to have recorded them.
Sharp may have missed some, but what he got was a treasure trove and we can only speculate what he missed.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 11:50 AM

According to Jim Carroll, if you buy a tin of salmon etc...

Well, if you have been listening to folk music for years and years and you then buy an album expecting folk music but you get folk music instead?

I shall happily listen to Dave Burland with his guitar and silky voice singing A Sailor Cut Down in His Prime, and I call it entertainment but whilst acknowledging the contribution Harry Cox made in ensuring the song has a new audience, I don't exactly call an old man crooning out of tune into a cheap microphone entertainment. Provenance yes, but we all have our particular ideas.

Led Zeppelin singing Gallows Pole is rock. An old traditional song can be rock then. Just as a Vin Garbutt song written last year can be folk.

It isn't difficult. They are all music. A folk style? Quite a few of those to go at. Warbling into a guitar c/w harmonica, mumbling with your finger in your ear, guitars, bass and drums, fiddles, bodhran and pipes, even banjo if you must stretch a point.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Lighter
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 11:59 AM

Getting back to "My Brother Sylvest'," the earliest reference I've found is in The Morning Oregonian (Portland), Sept. 28, 1908, p.8. Sung in a comedy called "Coming through the Rye," it is described as a "more or less well known...dainty little Dago ditty."

The magazine Our Navy (September, 1915), p. 42, mentions "Brother Sylvest'" as one of several "Famous Italians" along with "Chris Columbus...Garabaldi...Marconi."

Sorry, no lyrics.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 12:10 PM

"Just concurring with the views of Reg Hall, an early stalwart of the tradition- re- 'Lily of Laguna', the views I mentioned were expressed 50 years ago- if it's a good song, who cares if it is traditional or not- you lot can't even define it and PLEASE DON'T TRY!!!"

Defining what is traditional or not was precisely what Reg Hall was doing in that statement made fifty years ago - it's just that he was defining it purely by context and not at all by musical and lyrical content. My first reaction to his words (especially regarding the phrase 'interesting and meaningful' to describe the performance rather than plain 'enjoyable') was that they reeked of an elitism of their own. The perspective of a sociologist rather than a listener.

The problem with a 'context is everything' approach is that it means that Fred Jordan was 'authentic' when singing in the Church Inn in Ludlow, but not when at the National Folk Festival. You could say the same for Lizzie Higgins, or Willie Scott, or any traditional singer who ever performed for a 'folk scene' audience.

"the Child ballads are an important body of work but the chances of anyone giving a meaningful and sympathetic delivery of a Child ballad in 2015 are slim (at least 50 years ago there was a real possibility of hearing ballads in a social context)
There's always an exception of course delivered vibrantly to what is after all a tiny minority of the population- ie folkies)...
but such material is far better left to the academics these days I think."

We're all entitled to our differing tastes, Jim, but I do find that statement staggering. Why can no singer be expected to give a meaningful delivery of an old ballad in 2015? Are you saying that modern singers lack the imagination and empathy to find and communicate the excitement and emotional depth of material from two or three hundred years ago? Or is it just that it wouldn't go down well in the taproom of your local pub, so is therefore of no value? The material is valid as long as there is an audience ready to listen to it - who's entitled to decide what is an appropriate 'social context'?

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 02:37 PM

I'm sorry to send you on a wild goose chase, Jon. I didn't mean to. I have the original sheet music and a cylinder recording of the original singer. They're not difficult to come by.
Words by Jesse Laske and music by Fred Fischer, published in 1908 so your Morning Oregonian was referring to a song just out. I think there's a copy of the sheet music on Lester Levy site as well.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 03:23 PM

"I don't exactly call an old man crooning out of tune into a cheap microphone entertainment"
You are talking about personal taste again - nothing top do with definition
Harry, despite his age and all the problems that brings managed to convey the feeling of the songs to all who cared to listen - as did his contemporaries - fairly rare in most modern singing.
Singing with guitar' finger in ear - if you are going to denigrate a music you obviously don't like - the British tradition is largely an unaccompanied one - the traditional singers almost universally sang unaccompanied.
Nobody sings with "his finger in his ear" that would be stupid.
However the act of cupping the hand over the ear in order to stay in tune is centuries (possibly millenia) old - particularly useful to street singers and ballad sellers in the open air
Try to get it right
This thread has become overloaded with personal taste from people who neither like nor appear to understand folk song - somewhat arrogant to pontificate in those circumstances eh- what.
Personally, I think Led Zeppelin are noisy inarticulate shit, devoid of content - but I wouldn't put it forward as an argument that my music is better and it would be extremely arrogant of me to do so.
If you don't like the goods, don't muck 'em abaht.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Lighter
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 03:35 PM

Steve, I see the Lasky/Fischer song is called "My Brudda Sylvest."

The sheet music is not viewable due to "copyright restrictions."

It was copyrighted at the Library of Congress on May 16,1908.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 03:46 PM

Oh! Could have sworn I copied the Levy copy before I got my original. Can easily scan it for you if you're interested. I think I got it from Ebay.

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Nov 15 - 08:31 PM

"old man crooning out of tune into a cheap microphone entertainment"
Meant to add that the public recordings of Harry Cox were made by the BBC, by Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl, by Charles Parker and Phillip Donellan - all of whom used high quality, expensive microphones.
It appears you didn't get too much right in your posting Guest
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST
Date: 17 Nov 15 - 02:56 AM

Interestingly, some of the Child ballads have been recorded as beautiful music by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer. It's a good job real people don't share Jim Carroll's insular views. The album has, I believe, had over a million downloads on iTunes, who knows how many on Amazon and tracks appear on many compilations, including an extra session they did for The BBC.

Folk is taste you silly old man. It's a word we use in the same way as rock, pop or classical to denote a wide genre. The people at the tail end of a romanticised oral tradition are merely part of it. They captured the imagination of people who then turned it into music for a c20 audience. Provenance and to your particular taste, acceptable. To my taste, nostalgic for a folk club circuit that doesn't quite exist but if it's all the same to you, raw material in an artistic sense.

I gave a lift to someone the other day and happened to be listening to John Eliot Gardner's excellent interpretation of Vivaldi's Gloria. "Oh, you like your classical music then?" He said. "Yes" I said. Far better than trying to make pedantic irrelevant points by trying to say Vivaldi is baroque not classical.

The rewording of Jeff Beck's Hi Ho Silver Lining sung by twenty five thousand fans at the match last Saturday answers the original question. If that isn't an example of evolving in the oral tradition I fail to see what is.

I sing many child ballads but am not an academic in the subject. Why are people clapping at the end Jim? (Possibly because I've stopped singing, before anybody else says it.)

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Bonzo3legs
Date: 17 Nov 15 - 03:06 AM

"I think Led Zeppelin are noisy inarticulate shit, devoid of content" - surprising statement from someone who insists that gypsies be called travellers or was it the other way round!!!

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 17 Nov 15 - 03:34 AM

"Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer"
Somebody loaned me a copy of their Child ballad album earlier this year - I got three tracks in and gave it back - dreadful schmaltz!
As I said, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.
This should not be about personal taste, which is, as the label said, 'personal' and has nothing whatever to do with definition, which, once challenged, is avoided like the plague by people who don't actually like folk/traditional song but for some inexplicable reason, want to use the title for their own, unrelated songs.
MacColl once said in an interview we did with him that folk songs have served people for many centuries and have managed to survive true to their own utterance and in different forms throughout that time, but they will never survive if they fall into the hands of people who don't like them - that statement is beginning to make sense to me.
I've always been disturbed by those who described the old singers who were generous enough to give us our beautiful repertoire of songs with phrases such as "old man crooning out of tune into a cheap microphone entertainment" - ungracious, to say the least.
No - folk is not taste - you silly man - you cannot 'like' a genre of music into existence, any more than you can dislike it out of existence - it is what it is whether we like it or not (otherwise, there would be no Wagner, as afr as my tastes go!!)
I am appalled that a racist such as Bozo-no-Brain (the poster who described the ten Travellers recently burned to death in a tragic fire here in Ireland as "thieving Gyppos". when the news of their death was announced), should renew his attacks on Travellers on this thread - please go away.   
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
From: GUEST
Date: 17 Nov 15 - 03:47 AM

If it isn't about personal taste, why say only academics should have anything to do with Child ballads?

You have no concept whatsoever of the evolution of traditional song, it's integration into the fashions of the day, as exampled over hundreds of years or even, judging by your posts, an appreciation of music.

A useful librarian but no author or indeed reader.