Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From:
Gibb Sahib
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 10:19 PM
"Scholars are well able to sort it out"
No, it makes it much more difficult to sort things out when someone who purports to be representing tradition is not. This is especially the case due to standing notions about "the folk process." Something is put on the table, and one becomes effectively forced to consider it. And doubt of it - this thing that is now on the table - is brushed away with truisms about folk processes and "We may never know."
Just see the "What does 'Blood red Roses' Mean"" thread, for instance.
We don't have this problem with Pete Seeger.
Seeger's work, as an artist, is transparent (to scholars at least). Harker's work, as an academic, is transparent. Lloyd's work is not transparent.
To a large degree, the "folk" scene thrives off that lack of transparency. Paradoxically, and in part on the model of Lloyd, it asks that performers pretend to know the history of what they are presenting while at the same time valuing the appearance of authenticity that comes from not knowing *too* much. It's like trying to be vague and yet very positive at the same time.
I presented something on chanties at a conference in Liverpool (UK) in 2009. As part of a brief personal background narrative - in the interest of transparency - I mentioned that I had learned many chanties from books. Someone in the audience, an scholar of UK nationality, took issue with my authenticity, I suppose, asking how was it that I could purport to represent a tradition learned from books. (Additionally, he grumbled about some critique I made of Bert Lloyd.) Where did he want me to learn them from? Lloyd's recordings? Is that what is needed to legitimate my knowledge, to hear a performance? (Because the real folk aint got no book larnin'…they are slaves to what they hear only.) Guess where Lloyd learned most of the chanties from?: Books. Only in some cases he failed to render the melodies correctly as they were set down, as if he could not be bothered to accurately reproduce the notations in Colcord, Doerflinger, and Hugill's books. But that's OK, right? He simply made the song his own and, who knows, maybe that was a variation in the folk process (?!). Not to mention that some of the books _he_ used were dubious. And he rendered lyrics often in a way to conform to early 20th c. academic notions of English folk-song. Is that the folk process?
Yet because I admitted to using the written texts as my sources, I broke the illusion of the authentic performer who magically learns through osmosis in the "folk culture". More still, it was somehow necessary that my identity as a performer be authentic, in this subject area, in order to speak in an *academic* setting…although my performing life had little to do with the scholarship I was presenting.
This has never happened when I present, say, my work on music in Punjab (India). But when one touches upon something that can be put under the umbrella of "English folk music", a different, bizarre standard applies. Again, I think Lloyd was a model for this confounding of scholarship and folklore performance. One's academic talk is expected to get its authority from authentic performing identity, and one's performance is expected to be accompanied by academic knowledge. The way this paradox is dealt with is that folk performers present shoddy scholarship on one hand whilst pretending to not really know where their performances come from.
There is a question of ethics somewhere in all of this.
On a personal level: I find the ethics of scholarship to be rather clear: cite your sources, admit to what you don't know, and so forth. It's the ethics of performance that I find more difficult in contexts subject to the "folk standard" because you can find yourself in situations where your audience makes up their own story of what you're doing (and you don't want to bore them to death, or else there is no time, to explain what you're doing). I am quite a bit more touchy than most about this (!). I have had to recuse myself from performances where I am not comfortably that the audience will understand what is going on in terms of representation, as a matter of my personal ethical sensibilities. If most of the audience is not likely to understand where I am coming from automatically or if I am unable to adequately explain it, and if that means I am liable to be perpetuating false ideas, I avoid doing it.
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sj
