Hi Rosie, couple things - I do hope that describing singing without notes as 'old school' doesn't consign that necessary activity to the box of old git-dom. Singing off your phone is admittedly where the medium is compounding the aesthetic felony (is reading off paper really slightly more acceptable? Possibly ..) but nonetheless practitioners should be taken out & sunk. Other thing you might like to know is that Tennants thought Caledonia was a trad song & got a narsty shock when Dougie sent them the bill - that might be why the ad was pulled. Cheers, Deb
Tell it like it is! I was aiming for some diplomacy re. paper notes. Singing from memory is a practice that strengthens memory but I know there is a great deal of variability in people's memory abilities for all sorts of reasons. Also, both the photos of myself singing that I chose showed me with a piece of paper / book in my hand! In one case, because I was collaborating, singing something I hadn't had time to learn; and in the other, singing in a foreign language I don't speak.
Old school in this sense is a positive description meaning kind of 'golden age', or classic.
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this and how much I appreciate how the work you did providing links to the songs you reference (which I'm working my way through).
I'm assume there are festivals like this in the States, and if I ever hear of one nearby, I'll be sure to go. I love to sing, and I would love to be in a group of people singing old songs together (I do this at church, but most of the songs in the Episcopal hymnal aren't that fun to sing).
I was born in 1964, at the height (or close to it) of the folk music craze here in the U.S. When I started school, we sang folk songs when we had music class--this was probably the case through my 6th grade year in 1976. When I think back on those days, what interests me is the variety of the songs we sang--old English ballads that came to us via Southern Appalachia; work songs and train songs; there was even a song we sang that I think must have been a Jewish folk song (though I just tried to track it down and can't).
My dad never sang folk songs (I don't think I've ever heard my dad sing anything), but he had a lot of folk records that he liked to play. This was before he went to Vietnam. After Vietnam, he mostly played Creedence Clearwater Revival.
"Ursula Le Guin says that in the hard times coming, we will need (to be) realists of a larger reality." If you have a second, can you tell me where that's from?
Thank you Frances for this wonderful feedback! So many people sang folk songs at school. Those songs are still in there! The other night at a session I decided to sing The Teddybears' Picnic, because I was wearing my bear hat- furry with ears on. As I began, I thought 'Wait a minute, I don't know this song!' but as I kept singing, the song came to me. Singing is a different brain circuit to speaking, and sometimes very old people who are beyond speech can still sing.
The Le Guin quote is from the acceptance speech she gave when she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. (She died in 2018.) I have read an account- I think it was in her book 'Words Are My Matter'- where she wrote about how long it took her to craft this short speech: a long time. The quote people most often share from this speech is "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
I love when an old song comes back to you that way. Maybe because my dad was playing folk records at home at the same time we were singing them at school, a lot of those songs resurface fully formed from time to time from the dark recesses of my brain--always a treat!
Hi Rosie, couple things - I do hope that describing singing without notes as 'old school' doesn't consign that necessary activity to the box of old git-dom. Singing off your phone is admittedly where the medium is compounding the aesthetic felony (is reading off paper really slightly more acceptable? Possibly ..) but nonetheless practitioners should be taken out & sunk. Other thing you might like to know is that Tennants thought Caledonia was a trad song & got a narsty shock when Dougie sent them the bill - that might be why the ad was pulled. Cheers, Deb
Tell it like it is! I was aiming for some diplomacy re. paper notes. Singing from memory is a practice that strengthens memory but I know there is a great deal of variability in people's memory abilities for all sorts of reasons. Also, both the photos of myself singing that I chose showed me with a piece of paper / book in my hand! In one case, because I was collaborating, singing something I hadn't had time to learn; and in the other, singing in a foreign language I don't speak.
Old school in this sense is a positive description meaning kind of 'golden age', or classic.
Re. Tennents... Perils of faux-trad eh!
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this and how much I appreciate how the work you did providing links to the songs you reference (which I'm working my way through).
I'm assume there are festivals like this in the States, and if I ever hear of one nearby, I'll be sure to go. I love to sing, and I would love to be in a group of people singing old songs together (I do this at church, but most of the songs in the Episcopal hymnal aren't that fun to sing).
I was born in 1964, at the height (or close to it) of the folk music craze here in the U.S. When I started school, we sang folk songs when we had music class--this was probably the case through my 6th grade year in 1976. When I think back on those days, what interests me is the variety of the songs we sang--old English ballads that came to us via Southern Appalachia; work songs and train songs; there was even a song we sang that I think must have been a Jewish folk song (though I just tried to track it down and can't).
My dad never sang folk songs (I don't think I've ever heard my dad sing anything), but he had a lot of folk records that he liked to play. This was before he went to Vietnam. After Vietnam, he mostly played Creedence Clearwater Revival.
"Ursula Le Guin says that in the hard times coming, we will need (to be) realists of a larger reality." If you have a second, can you tell me where that's from?
,
Thank you Frances for this wonderful feedback! So many people sang folk songs at school. Those songs are still in there! The other night at a session I decided to sing The Teddybears' Picnic, because I was wearing my bear hat- furry with ears on. As I began, I thought 'Wait a minute, I don't know this song!' but as I kept singing, the song came to me. Singing is a different brain circuit to speaking, and sometimes very old people who are beyond speech can still sing.
The Le Guin quote is from the acceptance speech she gave when she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. (She died in 2018.) I have read an account- I think it was in her book 'Words Are My Matter'- where she wrote about how long it took her to craft this short speech: a long time. The quote people most often share from this speech is "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
Here is the speech in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk
Here's The Teddybears' Picnic, for the sake of completism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxFIGWm9M6w
I love when an old song comes back to you that way. Maybe because my dad was playing folk records at home at the same time we were singing them at school, a lot of those songs resurface fully formed from time to time from the dark recesses of my brain--always a treat!
Thank you for the LeGuin link!