ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 74 | April 2005
Trawling the Library for Rough Diamonds:
When I arrived at the National Library of Australia to take up the Fellowship bestowed upon me jointly by that institution and the National Folk Festival, I harboured the notion that our great nation, along with most of its residents, had no time for such a blurry conglomeration of ‘intangible culture’. I was therefore overwhelmed to discover what seemed like most of an entire department full of people and resources dedicated specifically to collecting, recording, preserving and disseminating folksong. During my time attached to my work station in the Oral History and Folklore Collection, I was often stunned to overhear staff members in one area mentioning the names of folksong collectors such as Norm and Pat O’Connor, or Bill and Alan Scott, and then a team of people in a meeting in another area mentioning names familiar to me as singers from the 1950s, 60s or 70s. Folklorists such as Edgar Waters, Hugh Anderson, and Keith McKenry would sometimes wander through, and at other times I would glance up and notice Gwenda Beed-Davey, Mark Tandy, Ruth Hazelton or Jenny Gall busy at their workstations. All I could think was, ‘This is the place to be!’ My task for the duration of the Fellowship was to trawl the field recordings for wallflowers, songs of beauty and potential that had hitherto slipped through the net of attention given to their brothers and sisters such as ‘Ryebuck Shearer’, ‘The Old Bark Hut’ and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. Although the results of research, along with many aspects of conducting research can be fascinating, there can also be long periods of mind-numbing tight focus from which you emerge, shaking your head vigorously while you try to remember your name. I’m pleased to say that this task wasn’t like that. The difficulties mainly lay with not becoming too distracted by parts of the field recordings that were irrelevant to the task at hand. These consisted of oral histories on unrelated subjects that only rarely meandered their way into becoming vital information, or led to a solitary ‘cracker’ of a song. I first weeded out around 30 or 40 songs, and these I played over and over, unravelling the import and meaning from fragments or indecipherable verses, while I began to determine how they might be tweaked into a performance and a recording without removing their dignity or unique social significance. I had decided not to notate or transcribe the music of the songs during my submission phase. This came from the notion I had formed while researching my Master of Arts thesis, i.e. that most performers of folk songs, many of whom are not regular readers of manuscript music notation (if at all) seldom learn songs from sheet music. Learning the tune of a song usually comes fairly instantaneously, even after one hearing perhaps. Learning the words of a song, however, is often helped greatly by notation of the lyrics, which also aids an understanding of the form of a song. Some songs have the usual verse, then refrain, then verse, then refrain and so on, while others are just verses. Other songs have a repeating refrain, and may alter the refrain slightly each time it is sung, or they may be identical up to the last refrain, which may be altered significantly. Some songs have four-line verses, others six or eight before the tune repeats itself, while others have extended final lines in the verses. The notation of the text can quickly sort out whether there are lines or half-lines missing, or half-verses etc., so notation of the lyrics was important to my particular task. More so than I originally thought, because up to the time I notated the lyrics of a song I was never sure I would be able to bring out the essence of the song, and yet no more than five seconds after notating the lyrics, the songs seemed to take off on an invigorating path of their own. Quite often I recorded the songs within 20 minutes or so of typing up the words and printing them out. I deliberately concentrated my search on small specific sections of the collection. I did this for two reasons: because I was convinced that the ground on offer was rich with specimens, and because I feel that future recipients of this Fellowship should know that the eyes haven’t been picked out of the findings. The ground is rich, and nearly every rough diamond future researchers will come across can be polished up to reveal a measure of its true worth to I recorded 12 songs in all, which have been allocated their own TRC catalogue number and which will be performed in a hopefully informative workshop, as well as in the concert in the main concert venue of the National Folk Festival held in Canberra at Easter. The songs will also be posted online on the National Library of Australia’s website, along with notations of origin and significance. |
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |