Where do we get songs from?

Subject: RE: Where do we get songs from?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 17 Aug 14 - 05:19 AM

I've got a stack of songbooks, but almost every song I know I've learnt either from a recording or from hearing another singer (or both). I go back to printed sources to learn the words properly, & sometimes to play around with different variants, but the sound of the song always comes first for me.

But if you're learning from a recording, you have to use a recording whose sound you've got some hope of imitating. If you're going to sing unaccompanied the key is to listen to unaccompanied singers, or accompanied singers who subordinate the accompaniment to the song (e.g. Tony Rose or Peter Bellamy). You can learn a song from a foursquare backbeat folk-rock job, or from a Bellowhead mashup, but it gives you a lot of extra work.

Subject: RE: Where do we get songs from?
From: GUEST
Date: 18 Aug 14 - 05:44 AM

People like Bella Hardy are showing there's a regional repertoire we risk forgetting. It started with Sharp, but fell into the hands of the middle-class in the National Songbook, attempting to impose a standard Gypsy onto the entire country. We've since seen Kathryn Tickell bring out the Northumbrian tradition, and now Bella Hardy on the Dales, and there's still a repertoire in Essex which nobody's tapped, because it was kept in fighting pubs where serious violence was routine and knive fights not unknown. Dave Kettlewell's work in the 1970s and the EAMT can show the way here.
Then we have all the Welsh repertoire.

That is one line of trad work. A second one is keeping it alive: this is where the folk tradition of disrespect for the dots comes in useful, we're not into warhorses, the standard performance orchestras are specialists in.

Then finally there's new work. What we have to be careful of here is that from 1977 onwards, the whole music industry has been in the grip of the big boys: OK, the indie movement has riposted, but we've not seen any really big independent labels set up in opposition, like Virgin did in the 70s, for example. Indeed, the folk world was on the leading edge of that, with two harpers cornering their markets, Robin Huw Bowen controlling Sain in Wales and Alison Kinnaird controlling Temple Music in Scotland (which was hardly surprising given she's married to the boss of the compant, Robin Morton). To be fair to them, they've found since themselves riding the whirlwind, as they found themselves constrained by the heritage they represent, but it was most certainly true in the 1980s that if you weren't part of their circle as a harper, you didn't get published: Anne MacDearmid was a case in point, for all that she carried the Mod throughout that period. And it wasn't just in harp that this was true.
Fortunately, there was no such dominant position in England, although it is noticeable that for the last ten years and more, it has become increasingly difficult for newcomers to make their way in. We see this, for example, in the comments about the Broadstairs Folk Festival, where the entire effort is designed to put bums on seats for the established groups, not to help smaller fish find a place in the scene.
After that diversion, let me return to the point, new writing. The folk work has always been the journalist of the music industry, commenting on what's happening in our society. We see multiculturalism appearing in the Imagined Village, for example. But who's making commentary about the tension inside the Muslim community over fundamentalism? Or is it too dangerous?