The other day, there was a post on Facebook in the Ballad Tree group entitled “What is important about a source singer?” As this site is all about the importance of source singers I thought I might make the first post on the blog an attempt to answer that question.

It is interesting that most respondents took the words source singer to mean people who they had heard singing, either live or recorded. It has been wonderful to be able to listen to Harry Cox, Sam Larner and many others singing and talking about their songs. However the vast majority of the English traditional song repertoire was gathered before the era of sound recording, and this is a very different thing.

It would be absurd to try to sing just like Harry Cox, but in theory it could be attempted. It is impossible to try to sing like John England. His voice, and the voices of all those who heard it, are stilled. John’s performance of the song is reduced to 44 notes on a music score.

If you want to sing the Seeds of Love you could try unaccompanied, use Cecil Sharp’s pianoforte score, overdriven electric guitars or singing bowls and a shruti box, but you can never re-create John’s performance. None of these versions would do any harm to the song itself, it remains, just as Cecil Sharp wrote it in his notebook.

I would also contend that claiming that there was an authentic way the songs were “intended” to be sung is invalid. Intended by whom? By the author (if you accept that there was a single author) or the singer? Neither would have any conception about the way the songs might travel in the future. To stress again, no performance in those days existed once the last verse was ended.

We know the basic tune, and usually a set of words for our collected traditional songs. We may know the name, location and age of the singer. But for the overwhelming majority of these songs, that is all we know, enough of the song to perform it, but not re-create it, and little indeed about the singer. And that is a pity.