On 17 July, 15:32, William Black  wrote:
> Gill Smith wrote:
> > Time and again, on Mike Hardin's prog, acres of turgid dross, usually
> > contemporary, are broken up by marvellous songs which, you be guessing
> > it, are trad.
>
> > And the reason they survived, unaided, was because people could - and wanted
> > to
> > - remember they
>
> I've been saying this for a decade.
>
> Nobody's listening...
>
> I meet a lot of kids who study popular music and performance at college
> and university and the decision to write and perform their own material
> acoustically rather than in a band is just a career move.
>
> But they call it 'folk'...

They can call it what they like. Doesn't make it so.

> Traditional 'folk' isn't technically challenging to either sing or play,
> although you do have to emote with your material which some people find
> difficulty,
> and so the rather highly technically competent people playing for
> money these days aren't terribly interested in playing it...

The trouble with a lot of modern contemporary "folk" is just that
there's too much of it. Also, many performers will take the fact that
they get applause as all the evidence they need that they are the next
great songwriting phenomenon. So they do more and more.
The thing with traditional song is that it has survived the test of
time which contemporary stuff obviously can't claim. Some of it will
survive and who are we to say which will and which won't. Sadly some
excellent stuff will get lost in amongst the dross and some lesser
stuff will survive but that's the way it goes. What gets me is the way
many young trad performers just don't understand what they're singing.
It's as if a good voice and a modern arrangement is all that's needed
- but it takes more than that to raise it above "passing interest".
You have to listen and learn and then live inside the song - and that
goes for contemporary songs too, though the trouble here is there is
just too much that only the writer can live inside (and too much that
has too little substance anyway).
Both Cohen and Thompson have written songs (regardless of whether they
are now considerred "folk") that I think will still be sung in their
simplest form in decades to come. They are good enough I believe to
eventually sit alongside some that we now call traditional though we
have to remember that all songs must have been written by someone
sometime. I couldn't say for certain which songs from their
outpourings *will* last but I believe some will. As a songwriter
myself, I wish some of my songs might survive longer than I do too but
I am heard by far (far far) fewer people so my chances are not good :-
(
In the end what counts to me is that there are songs out there whether
traditional or not that can be sung by people (whether folkies or not)
well enough to move me - and it'll take more than a good voice or
clever arrangement to do that.

An aside: I once heard of a Thompson song being sung by an amateur who
introduced it as "traditional Scottish" - I think it was "Withered And
Died". There's another topic for the folkies!
> --
> William Black
>
<snip>