Subject: RE: Robin Hood ballads
From:
GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 03 Nov 11 - 06:57 AM
Read through your offering, got nothing out of it – as usual, even after hacking my way though the superfluous and pontificating verbiage.
I'm hardly surprised, Jim - though, as ever, I'll leave the superfluous pontificating up to you.
Last word, then I'll leave you to your armchair musings.
Is that a promise? I'm just about done in here.
As long as I have argued with you, your attitude has been one of total, out-of –hand dismissal of the work of collectors, researchers, ballad and folk song scholars – never argument - that would have necessitated your having taken the trouble to examine their efforts – no sign of that ever having happened.
I've never dismissed their work, just questioned their methods - the grounds, assumptions and consequent dilemmas arising. I have examined their efforts in great detail. The main dilemma is on one hand you have an uneducated class of Traditional Singers, and one the other an highly educated class of scholars who study them. There's the issue right there. If you find no problem with that, then fine. Obviously it's never occurred to you.
".... awaiting my attention"
Somewhat pompously put I thought.
I rarely get a chance to read these days, so I have a small pile of books awaiting my attention. What's pompous about that? Everything I say you insist on subjecting to a negative spin. It took forever tracking down a copy of Harker's book anyway, but after reading Georgina Boyes' The Imagined Village I just didn't have the heart to pursue it further. See above, you know? God knows the dilemma of social class / subject & object / myth & reality / wholesale reinvention, fantasy & agenda is writ large in The Revival so as to be integral to the thing.
Harker's 'Fakesong' was published half-a-century ago; I found it a superficially nasty attack on easy (dead) targets, but at least he made the effort of reading their ideas, writing a book and having it published rather than making snide attacks from his armchair, and at least I took the trouble to read it (twenty five years ago).
I've skimmed it, and it seems pretty unremarkable to me, especially after Georgina Boyes' assessments which only serve to confirm the worst of it and yet no one has a problem with that whatsoever.
You have persistently dismiss the work of collectors, despite the fact that you have never sung nor listened a single traditional song that has not passed through the hands of a collector.
Like I say, I do not dismiss their work, just insist that we remain aware of the problems of The Collectors and The Collected, and how their findings are then interpreted according to a xeno-methodology that is contrary to the nature of the songs themselves. Taxidermy and Taxonomy are the order of the scholarly mind;, whereas the songs belong to another system entirely, if, indeed, they belong to a system at all. I agree that my familiarity with Folk Song is entirely due to collectors - I regularly celebrate the work of Max Hunter for example, and am deeply indebted to University of Missouri for making his archives so readily accessible (would that were the case over here) BUT that doesn't mean I have to agree with their assumptions, methods or conclusions. There will always be issues, but data is data, and often it's all too easy to overlook the fact. Generally, however, I take it in good faith, and in listening to a song, I do so as an artist, not a scholar.
You have written of the song tradition as a figment of the imagination, or even the deliberate invention of collectors
The songs, of course, aren't a figment, but much of what I have read about the nature of The Tradition is a figment - a theory - like the very notion of Folk itself, or the 1954 Definition, or The Folk Process. I would question if we might think of a Tradition at all given the fragmentary nature of even the best of it when all that results is an ossified version of the fluid culture that's being preserved. For me that's quite a huge contradiction. Why do we feel the need to preserve stuff? To collect it? To lament the loss of Traditional Culture when the people themselves are quite happy to see it go? These are important questions (not rhetorical ones!) especially as Folk them becomes a reactive aspect of post-modern bourgeois romanticism, however so smug in its inner-radicalism, wherein the sort of correctness you espouse serves as a hermetic seal on the sunshine-jar. What was once the pure JOY of common creative cultural expression is reduced to the dead weight of pseudo-religion.
Greig and Duncan's magnificent 8 volume collection of songs made in one single Aberdeenshire parish; Tom Munnelly's 22,000 songs recorded from Irish traditional singers, Sharp's huge harvest from the south of England and the Southern Appalachians, Mike Yates, Hugh Shield, Seamus Ennis, Hamish Henderson, James M Carpenter..... charlatans or idiots or both.
I could add to that list, but it doesn't change the basic dilemmas here - they are intrinsic to the nature of the beast and nothing is going to change that. I would have thought that it would be better to OWN these issues and dilemmas rather than reject them outright with yet another litany of well-intentioned scholars and idealists. I applaud these people, I really do, many of them of great heroes of mine, but it's always going to be an issue that specific Traditions were preserved by outsiders, and turned into something else entirely.
And in return you offer – what? No debate, no argument, not even an indication that you have examined their work, beyond plundering it for songs; just out-of-hand dismissal with enough insulting clichés to fill a sizeable dictionary.
Jim, I think I've been more than generous with my time in debating these issues with you over the years, much less over the last few days. I'm not given to insults either - those I leave to you, i.e.
"I'm researching all the time,"
It doesn't show.
Which is typical enough of your put-downs.
"Tradition you claim to represent"
Waste of time again I know but where have I (or any collector) ever claimed to "represent the tradition" -
So what the hell else are you doing it for?
I've reported back on what we found and put our work up for public scrutiny, nothing more.
So why these constant tirades and dismissals of the creative work of others?
You continue to deal in shallow, facile and insulting cliches aimed at the work of others, but when it comes to discussion of the use you make of that work.....
....I invariably rise to the occasion with good grace, as I feel I have done quite admirably throughout this present exchange.
When I have the temerity to criticise singing that you put up for public scrutiny it becomes a "relentless onslaught" - you leap on the nearest table and scream "mouse".
You don't criticise it, you subject it to received absolutes. There's a crucial difference here. If you don't like it then fair enough (truth to tell I'd be more worried if you did) but what baffles me is the implication of a secret school of critical correctness which has been the issue here all along. Folk is as Folk Does, like anything else.
Like all egotists you have proved yourself more than willing and able to dish it out, but when it comes to taking it.......
If you can't take criticism, stay at home and sing in the bath; I'm sure the rubber duck will be highly entertained.
The criticism doesn't bother me, Jim - what bothers me is when the critic resorts to ill-informed value judgements to justify their knee-jerks, to bolster their own lack of understanding by somehow being 'in the know'. Thus do you resort to limp little put-downs such as:
As far as I'm concerned your singing indicates you to be a somewhat hackneyed folkie – nothing more.
Which typifies your critical currency. Very poor, if I may say so.
"Hermetical Correctness" " Imperialistic Class Condescension" "Death Eater"
Yet more nasty and misleadingly dishonest cliches to add to the dictionary
Hardly dishonest. You constantly imply you are privy to secret knowledge of how to sing folk songs correctly, thus I assume you abide by a system of Hermetical Correctness. As for Imperialistic Class Condescension, I would have thought that much was obvious enough to even to most casual observer of The Folk Revival of the last 100 years and more - read Georgina Boyes' account. Death Eater is from J K Rowling's Harry Potter Books - the Death-Eaters are a fascistic elite devoted to a dictatorial tyrant intent on ridding the Magic World of liberalism and the influence of non-magical outsiders. The term for these outsiders in the books is Muggles, and I note (to my despair) that this term is now common in Folk circles in referring to non-Folkies, but that's by the by I'm sure.
Like I say, keep up the good work.
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sj
