At the beginning of his book Ireland Sings: An Anthology of Modern and Ancient Irish Songs and Ballads, which Essex Music Limited published in 1965, Irish rebel folk singer-songwriter Dominic Behan included the following "Note To Young Singers:"
"Historically, collectors of folk material, like Sharpe, Herd, Ord, Child etc. have made significant contributions to the preservations of folk-lore. But, to imagine--as some people would have us believe at present--that balladry is in itself worth of study in an abstract art sense, is a foolish and undesirable premise. That everything in relation to folk song must be limited to the purely `Ethnic', with no allowance for the day to day changes which are a feature of any society is tantamount to asking us for our signature on a death warrant for folk-lore. Above all, it is asking us to sing with an academic tongue in cheek, and, before we bawl our heads off, we must find out why. It is enough to prevent young people from making their own songs...
"All this emphasis on `Folk knowledge,' `Ethnic approach' etc. is hindering the young singer. It is educating him/her into the phony accent, the idiomatic restrictive, and the world where song is no longer something to have on one's lip, but a kind of mysticism related only to the professorial and ultra academic. Forget the `Folk pundit'. Open your mouth, and, whatever your voice is like, sing! And to hell with the `Ethnicists'. Folk-song is not the special preserve of the few, but the undeniable heritage of the many."
And in the "Notes On Some Song Makers Of The Past," that he included in the same songbook, Dominic Behan also wrote the following:
"In this collection of traditional and contemporary songs the urban may tend to outweigh the rural tradition somewhat. This is because I have deliberately tended to include only songs from the countryside written earlier than the nineteenth century. Poor, wailing songs, and songs of love, inspired chiefly by Thomas Moore's success as a 19th-century court jester, are not for me. If you put your hands up to Heaven in despair at my occlusion of `Maire my Girl' or `My Mary of the Curling Hair', I can only suggest that there are plenty of recordings of this type of song made by the type of lyrical tenor likely to sing them...
"When Tomas Moore was eighteen years of age he was nearly charged alongside Robert Emmett with sedition in 1798. He wrote two pieces--anonymously--for `The Press', a highly revolutionary paper, and his Mother heard about it. She made Tom promise never again to do the likes. He kept his promise; indeed, he went further, he made a point of dedicating his translation of the `Odes of Anacreon' to the Prince of Wales...
"Before [Lord] Byron died, he entrusted his memoirs to Moore for posthumous publication. That Byron had given them to Moore's care as a friend no more worried Tommie than the sanctity of the songs he took from Ireland's folklore and so bowdlerized. At the behest of Lord Byron's relatives he burned the manuscripts in their presence. Emmett had been hanged drawn and quartered and his headless remains dumped, forty-nine years before Moore died peacefully in 1852..."
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