The Forgotten Professional Popular Singer in England

So much has been said in the ongoing and partly fruitless debate about 'whose' the folk songs are, that the context of performance and especially of performers is habitually forgotten or ignored. Yet the singer of the song must be a key element in the search for the proprietors of the music. There is a sharp class contrast between the roles of bard and beggar-balladeer, with many phases between the extremes. In this essay a number of professional singer-roles and types will come under discussion, as well as the distinction, not always clear-cut, between the internal and the external performer. One purpose of highlighting them in the form of a historical and geographical survey is to draw up a useful hypothesis which will participate in enabling us to destroy certain myths about the 'origins' of folk song, while we are aware that any statements related to 'the mists of time' must necessarily remain at the level of hypothesis. Our knowledge of the sung past must be considerably more shaky than even that of the instrumental past. While musicologists are able to make guesses about preferences of scale and modality by examining archaeological finds of instruments, as Gyorgy Csajfighy has done when examining the fiveand six-hole pipes of the descendants of the Hunnish tribes in the Carpathian basin, no such material assistance is available to the investigator of the singer. However, I believe certain conclusions of worth can be reached, even if only at the level of hypothesis, by examining that which we do know in order to make intelligent guesses of what we do not. A favourite method of looking at the invisible past, especially for those mistakenly bewailing the evolution of song (and singer) is to make parallels

Art · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History