Re: Folkie Fans: Can you help?

Date: 19 Jul 2003 00:36:17 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk
Size: 1,401 bytes

email-address-deleted wrote in news:3fe7a1a4.0307181557.7cebfab3
@posting.google.com:
> Hi Folk Music Fans-
>
> Need your help as part of an assignment, would be best to interview
> fans of the genre. While I am a fan myself, I don't know how to
> explain it for my understanding (it's not a written paper or anything,
> it's just something I need to learn).
>
> "Also, acquaint yourself with the nature of folk music. Consider how
> folk music is transmitted and the way in which members of a society
> feel a sense of owenrship of the material."
>
> "Ownership" is what gets me....it's the writer's song, even for
> something like "Amazing Grace". It may be of popular appeal, but it is
> not _our_ song..
That's a relatively new song. Some English-language folksongs are older
than any variety of English we'd be likely to understand. They've been
passed on partly by written transmission, but mostly by people listening
to others sing it.
So -- there are several hundred years of people making changes they think
are improvements; forgetting words, and singing words that sound kind of
right; mishearing unfamiliar words; changing endings; adding new bits and
pieces.
And the original "writer" might have been illiterate; and took a tune
from another song, and borrowed verses from two or thirteen other songs.
--
Dan Goodman email-address-deleted
Journal: http://dsgood.blogspot.com