The Whole Song?

Subject: RE: The Whole Song?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 07 Sep 06 - 12:26 AM

Try the first and last verses of 'The holly and the ivy'.... now THAT'S boring!

LTS

Subject: RE: The Whole Song?
From: GUEST
Date: 07 Sep 06 - 04:01 AM

Sorry to have missed this fascinating thread, have been away; but I have just read through the lot.
As far as I can see the only point I would take serious issue with is that of attention span.
I have usually found that when people refer to a short attention span, they are talking about other people's and not their own, yet we are all (most of us anyway) capable of sitting down for hours on end and reading a book, or sitting through a 2-3 hour play or film, so why should it be automatically assumed that people are no longer capable of listening to a (usually five to ten-minute max. long) ballad as long as the text is coherent and it is sung passably well.
Ewan MacColl was consistently the best ballad singer I have ever heard; he put at least 137 Child ballads back into circulation, yet he told me once that when he first started singing long ballads in public he had convinced himself that audience's concentration (they didn't have attention span in those days!) was not sufficient for him to sing them right through, so he would sing half in the first part of the evening and half in the second (he mentioned the ballad Gil Morris). He continued the practice until members of the audience asked him not to, at which point he decided that it was not the audience's attention that was the problem, but his own confidence in what he was singing – he was just using the audience as an excuse.
The longest song I have ever heard was sung by a 70 + year old farmer here in the West of Ireland. The song 'True Lover's Discussion' lasts over 15 minutes and doesn't exactly have an action-packed plot – just a discussion by two people about whether they should or shouldn't! I saw the singer, Martin Reidy, sing it once in front of a packed audience in a bar during a music festival and try to shorten it (lack of confidence), only to be shouted down and more or less forced to sing it in full, which he did with great relish. Martin had several other long songs, including 'Father Tom O'Neill', slightly shorter than 'Lover's', and he once said that "a song isn't worth learning unless it has a few verses in it".
As another traditional singer once told us, "if you like a thing well enough yourself, you should have no problem getting others to like it".
"Whatever works" sums it up for me.
Jim Carroll