Subject: RE: Shirley Collins - can she sing?
From:
Nerd
Date: 08 Feb 04 - 03:39 PM
GUEST of 2:54 PM,
GUEST of 10:48 AM yesterday introduced the concept of "real" traditional singers, and I was using it in the sense that I thought s/he meant it in.
To answer your question, I think "old-style traditional singing" is becoming rarer and rarer, and what we usually call "the revival" has essentially eaten what we usually call "the tradition." What I mean is that the aesthetic of folks like Walter Pardon is rare today, and people who like similar songs are much much more likely to sing in a revival context with revival aesthetics. I don't object to labelling the revival context a continuation of the tradition, but we should realize that some different aesthetic principles are involved. In other words, you can say that the revival IS today's tradition, but that doesn't mean it is the same aesthetically as Walter Pardon's tradition. You're quite right that WP's aesthetic may be quite different to what was fashionable 100 yrs before that, although the surviving documents like the Copper Family's book suggest that aesthetic change went slower in the 19th century.
GUEST of 10:48 AM yesterday (maybe you're the same GUEST?) said that if we did not like Shirley Collins we did not know what a "real" traditional singer should sound like. I assumed when s/he introduced the concept of "real" s/he was referring to some of the old-style traditional singers, whom as I said I often prefer to Shirley. Thus my answer above.
If s/he was instead referring to the folk revival, I would argue that Shirley is not by and large representative of that crowd either; she is neither typical of the older tradition nor of the newer tradition. Given this, what a singer "should" sound like is irrelevant. If you like Sandy Denny and Anne Briggs and Norma Waterson but don't like Shirley Collins, you know as well as the Shirley Collins fan what a folk revival (or "new-style traditional") singer "should" sound like. It's really just down to taste, and there's no "should" about it. Nor is it kind to tell people they ought to listen to some other style of music just because they don't like yesterday's GUEST's favorite singer.
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sj
