Season 2: Episode 5 - Interview with Steve Roud Part 1

In this fascinating "A Tisket-Tasket" episode, renowned folklorist and historian Steve Roud engages in a captivating conversation with host Gina about his extensive work on folk songs, nursery rhymes, and the intricacies of folklore. With a career spanning decades, Roud shares insights into the process of creating the Folk Song Index, a comprehensive database of over 360,000 entries covering English, American, Canadian, and Irish traditions. He delves into the challenges of defining and categorizing folk songs, emphasizing the importance of evidence and historical context. Want to know more? Visit the blog at atiskettasketpodcast.com or email Gina at info@atiskettasketpodcast.com. #folksongs, #nurseryrhymes, #folklore, #SteveRoud, #Folklorist 

Transcript

Note - this transcript is autogenerated and may contain errors. If you have questions or concerns, please contact Gina at info@atisketasketpodcast.com

Gina: ...and welcome to another episode of the "A Tisket Tasket" podcast. I'm your host, Gina. And today I get to share with you something that I'm so excited about. And I honestly cannot put into words how absolutely thrilled that I had the opportunity to interview Steve Roud. Now, if you've listened to any episode of my podcast, then you are aware of how much I respect Steve Roud's work and use the Roud Folk Song Index Number to talk about my research in nursery rhymes.

Nursery rhymes, as I've said before in the past, are quite difficult to track down and research because of the transitive nature of the way they're categorized. They are often passed down worldly. They are passed down over generations and generations. They, unlike pieces of traditional literature, don't often have titles associated with them.

And so, Opie and Opie had their own way of indexing or organizing these nursery rhymes by their first line. And Roud, who was inspired by Opie and Opie and Child, and we'll talk about that in the interview, created his Roud Folk Song Index number. Now, if you're new to the podcast and you're just jumping off onto this episode, then, well, you're in for a treat.

Gina: But the Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 350,000 or so. He's adding to it each day, folk songs and rhymes, lores, and things like that, child songs, collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world, specifically England, Ireland, United States. He's really looking for Canada as well.

And this is all completed solely by Steve Roud. And he talks about how he got started with this in this interview. But Roud Index is a combination of the Bradstein Index, for those of you who are interested in index work, and the Field Reporting Index, compiled by Roud, and it's being housed in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

It includes recordings from 1900 to 1975, and it used to be on CD, but now, luckily, we all can access it, and there's going to be a link in the description, and there's obviously a link on my website. It is maintained by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which is EFDSS, and I hope that even after he's gone, it will continue to be maintained because it's so integral to researchers like me who want to continue to research these folklore and folk songs.

Gina: That are constantly changing, and we're always trying to figure out where they came from, where they're going, how they're changing. As Roud says, the primary function of the Roud Folk Song Index is a research aid. It helps to correlate versions of traditional English language folk song lyrics independently documented over past centuries.

By many different collectors across especially the UK and North America. Traditionally on this podcast, I try to give the names of who first recorded it and where they recorded it. So, we'll be talking about how they've researched it. I've talked about John Orchard Halliwell. I've talked about Child.

I've talked about Lady Gollum. And I've talked about these researchers who do ethnographic field work, and what Roud has done is he's collected how all other researchers have looked at it. Let's once and for all have a central repository or index where we have a number associated with the song that anyone could look up.

Gina: And I mean, I could talk about this forever, which I do, but please enjoy this interview. It's broken up into two parts because the interview is about an hour long and the way I have my podcasts uploaded, I can only do about a half an hour at a time or so. This is me having an absolutely wonderful chat with Steve Roud, and I'm so excited to share it with you today.

Please check out my blog, link in the description below, if, like, if you are interested in seeing more of something like this. I'm going to try to include interviews throughout the year, and I cannot believe I got to start with, uh, with Roud, but In any case, enjoy me talking to Roud about his wonderful folks on Index and just what a wonderful and amazing person he is.

Gina: I had such a wonderful time talking with him and enjoy the weirdness of nursery rhymes. So first, can you introduce yourself and tell my audience a little bit about who you are?

Steve Roud: Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm Steve Roud, as you know. I was born in South London in 1949, so I'm 75 this year. Of, sort of, lower middle-class, upper working-class parents.

Went to a good school, but failed and then left. But two of the key things in my life that, that led to this moment, as it were. One is an organization called the Woodcraft Folk, which you won't have heard of. It's like the Scouts and the Girl Scouts, but, so it's mixed, formed in the 1920s.

Steve Roud: But it's, it's left-wing. So my family is, is lefty. Not far left, but left of center. And the point about the Woodcraft is that they do hiking and camping. And they also, because they are coeducational, they also do folk dancing and singing around the campfire and all of that kind of stuff. So I had a background in not only lefty interest in the people and the folk but also background in dancing and singing.

Once I'd left school and bummed around for a while, I was in Berkeley in 1969, living in the, for a short while on the beach in Hawaii in 69. So I'm a child of that sort of era. And then I came home again. But after bumming around for a while, I started working in a library. And then ever since I've been a librarian, and I realized that that was my forte.

Steve Roud: That's the sort of thing I like doing. I love books. You can see behind me just one of the four rooms of books in the house. Amazing. And I like indexing. I like information, you know, supplying people with information, access to stuff. So that's, I'm retired now, but for 20 odd years I was a local history librarian.

That was my day job. But then that spilled over into my folklore. interests as well. So we'll talk about the index in a moment. But the other thing about my teenagerhood, as it were, and young twenties, is that it was the time of the big folk revival in Britain, a little bit behind the American one. That was quite influenced by the American one for a while.

Steve Roud: But certainly in the fifties, I was too young to take much notice. But in the sixties, The folk movement was a definite thing for young people to do. It was countercultural. Your parents didn't like, well, my parents did like it, but a lot of parents didn't like it very much. It was left-wing, it was protest, it was all that kind of stuff.

So again, that influenced me, got interested in the songs and the dances, but I grew out of that and started having a sort of academic interest rather than a performance interest. I don't sing, even though I research songs, which is very unusual. Most people who research folk songs are singers. I don't play an instrument.

Steve Roud: I do call up barn dances. But I'm not interested in the performance of things. I'm interested in the history. That's just the way I am. It's wonderful to think of you bumming around and living in Hawaii on a beach. Oh my goodness. Yes, that, that actually fits with like what I think of when I think of the 60s and the 70s.

Gina: Yeah, you're dead right. That's exactly what it was like. Well, that's absolutely wonderful. That's a wonderful beginning and a great inspiration into what you went into. And I, I absolutely love it. You, you talked a little bit about you growing up into what, what was it called? It's not the Scouts, but what was it?

Steve Roud: It's called the Woodcraft. The Woodcraft Folk, okay. So yeah, that kind of reminds me of, in the United States, we have 4 H, which is a, more of an agricultural based group, and which I think is funny because it's more right-wing than left, although myself, I'm more left. But that's actually where I started to learn a lot of, Folk songs as well.

There were a lot of camp songs. There was a lot of dancing. And so that just kind of brought me back there. So would you say your folklore interest kind of started with your crazy youth then and then carried on into your career?

Steve Roud: Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's where it stems from the Woodcraft. But yes, I mean, you just touched on a point that the right wing and the left wing Both use folklore for their own purposes. Absolutely. You know, the Hitler youth. Oh, absolutely out there hiking and camping and singing folk songs around the campfire while the Woodcraft were out there singing, you know.

Steve Roud: Absolutely. Different topics, you know, same medium. Yeah, but we were singing different songs of course. But even so, you can't assume, I mean for a long time we've assumed that folk Absolutely. An interest in folk is left-wing because of, you know, the Pete Seeger generation and the protest song singers.

But the right wing also used the stuff in, in, in their own way. So I got interested in folklore through the Woodcraft, through the folk revival, but my first sort of research was actually into what are called mummers' plays, which is an annual custom in this country of people going around acting out a play.

From London, we moved to Hampshire, which is down in the south of England. And I met a couple of people who had been in traditional mummers' teams in the 1950s, started a project of actually collecting. And that's Researching, and that's where I learned how to research things, how to use library catalogs properly.

Steve Roud: And you know, this kind of thing. It's the photocopier that really, you know, the xerox machine that made all the difference to my generation. 'cause you didn't have to sit there in the library and write everything out. Right. Just go on Xerox in the same way as the computer made the difference for the next generation.

So, I then became Librarian of the Folklore Society for about 15 years. It was an honorary post, it was, you know, but my hobby, not, not paper job. But that plugged me into the general folklore world. I was interested in children's folklore because of the Opie's books. I mean, the lore and language. Yep. Yep, lore and language of sculpture.

It was the first folklore book that I owned. Somebody bought it for me for Christmas, and it was just a revelation. Because, you know, I, that was my generation. They were, that was published in 59, which is when I was 10. So, I recognized every rhyme in the book. You know, every rhyme in the book. You know, it was wonderful.

And that inspired me to collect children's games, children's rhymes, and Backtrack a bit, I think I was actually a born librarian before I realized that, because in the 60s I used to catalog and index my books. Pop records. Oh, right. I mean, a lot of people used to do this, but you know, I used to write, write down on little five by three cards, the name of the artist and the song and what the catalog number was and stuff, whether it was in the charts.

Steve Roud: I was doing that for some years, really, just as a hobby. Then when I got interested in traditional song, folks are, I just transferred those skills that I had been learning into that. So I started indexing PokéSongs really just to get control of my own collection. Because I had, at that time, I probably had 10 books and 4 records.

I've now got 10,000 books and 4,000 records. It was a way of getting control of what librarians called control of the data, of the information. When I went to library school later and became, it gets when I was in my thirties, I went back to school and studied. I realized then what I was doing. I was trying to invent the database before computers were there.

Steve Roud: Mm-Hmm. And I realized that I had been doing this librarianship stuff, this indexing myself just feeling my way. The library school gave me the sort of theoretical stuff behind it. So my index grew from that amateur in my bedroom writing it out in longhand. And then they invented computer school. Just for you.

Absolutely. And it all stemmed from there. So it was a question of feeling my way and then realizing that what I was doing might actually be useful for other people. Absolutely. I mean, that's certainly that's a spark of inspiration is something I felt myself. I didn't know that folklore was an area of study.

And so when I sat down and started to research these nursery rhymes, I have a history and. in academia and English, but it was just so absolutely wonderful to find a, wow, there's a group of people out there or something out there already exists. So it was just like, it just made me so even more excited to do it.

So I definitely can understand that you, the, the feeling that you probably found of, oh, wow, there's actually already a name for what I'm doing. That's right, yes, I'm not just an idiot. Exactly! I'm a proper idiot rather than an amateur one. Yes. About the index then. So, I mean, that, in some ways, that explains, explains what's wrong with the index, is that I started as an amateur.

Steve Roud: And I've, some of the decisions I made back in 19, I, I date it from 1970, my index, because that's when I, you know, the books by Childe, Childe Babs. Yeah, okay. Five volumes, Dover edition, paperback. Uh, in 1970, I was working in a paint factory before I became a librarian. Um, and all I could afford was one volume and the bus fare into London and back.

Volume a week and the bus fare there and back. So I know it was 1970 that I bought those. And I was, I had no idea that you could order a book from the local bookshop. So I was going into London on the bus. And I was really worried that they would sell Volume 5 before I got there. Because I had, you know, I had no idea.

Steve Roud: I could just walk into my local bookshop and order it, and they'd get it for me. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that when you start off as an amateur, especially a long term project like this, a lot of the things that you do at the beginning, you wouldn't do if you were doing it properly, if you were a trained indexer.

And those things carry on because you never have time to go back and fix them. Oh my goodness. Story of my life. Absolutely. Right. So it's worrying when, when proper indexers look at my index and say, Oh, well, you shouldn't be doing that. Yeah. I didn't know that in 1970. So the index grew for my own interest to get control of my own material.

Steve Roud: That's how I sort of learned the basics. I mean, it's fairly obvious that if you're indexing songs, you're going to write down the title. You're going to write down the singer and where the singer is. And it struck me very quickly that you write down the first line as well as the title, because the titles vary a lot in folk songs.

You know, your basic data is, it's not rocket science, it's just getting it down and putting it in alphabetical order or numerical order, as it were. And of course at the beginning, it's of no use to anybody else except me, because it's only got a few hundred records in it. But by the time it got to about 15,000 songs, or 15,000 entries, that's the time I started being a librarian.

I started talking to the librarian at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. English Folk Dance and Song Society, EFTIS, in London. And he said, well, you know, give us a copy. It's on computer now. It's on floppy disks. So I gave it to him and he said, Oh, well, there's not much on there, is there? He started using it in his work.

Steve Roud: And that's when I thought, Oh, okay. This is worth doing not just for me, but for other people. I didn't know then that You know, 55 years later, I'd still be doing it. I didn't plan that far ahead. But it then grew from that time, and perhaps Malcolm Taylor, his name is. I mean, he is still Malcolm Taylor, but he's no longer, he's retired from the life vets, and he made suggestions of how to improve it and stuff, and how to make it more professional.

Steve Roud: But the one thing, and this is the key thing to it all, and that's the round numbers, I should backtrack then. Fairly early in the game, I realized that, from a librarianship point of view, folk songs are a nightmare because they have slippery titles. The same title can refer to completely different songs.

The same song can have literally dozens of titles. There are spelling, archaic spellings, there's American spellings, there's Irish spellings, there's Scottish words etc. So I had to devise a system that gave me control of those. Because what I wanted people to be able to do was to find the song called, which we call the Gypsy Laddie and you call Gypsy Davy.

Steve Roud: The key point of it is to find that song. And I found that when I was still doing my cards, I'd write the title down and at the bottom I'd write the other titles, but then I had to write another card for each of those titles. And the Gypsy Laddie was the first song that I realized, once you've got to ten titles, you then have to write them out ten times.

Exactly. Yes. And I thought, there must be a better way of doing this. So I gave it, I called it number one. That was the first song that caused me any trouble, so that was number one. So in other words, the cards became an index to sheets of paper where I'd write down all the details. And the card just referred me to Tipsy Laddie C.

Steve Roud: Number one, and you may go to number one. So, sorry, we're getting into Well, I was actually curious to know why that was number one, so you answered a personal question for me, so I appreciate it. A lot of people think that the numbers actually mean something, and they I've seen on the internet, people with their theories.

Steve Roud: It literally is. The next song that I find that causes a problem, it's the next number. So, Too Bad He Was Number One. Uh, actually this must have been No, it was after I'd got to Child, but if I was starting again, I would have made the first 305 of my numbers the same as the Child 305. Because my number one is child 200.

Steve Roud: It's random, you know. Mm-hmm. People criticize me for that. So that's one of the things I would have done differently, but it was too late by the time I realized it. Anyway, so it was Malcolm Taylor that called them round numbers up to then I was calling them appendix numbers or some something obscure and he said no there's child numbers and there's laws numbers and other people had numbers named after them so these are going to be called round numbers.

So that's why they're called round numbers and really that's the key to it all. If you're looking for folk songs because of the slipperiness of the information, get the number. You can pull them all together. Of course, the next problem down the line is how do you say this song is the same as this song?

That's, we can talk about that till the cows come home, but basically, most people are looking for versions of a song. Either to sing them or to research them. Absolutely. They might be looking for one song. They might be looking for all the songs sung in their village or their state. They might be looking for all the songs from one singer or all the songs sung by male singers or female singers.

Steve Roud: It all boils down to they're looking for songs. So that's the key to it. Who sang it, where they sang it, when they sang it is important information. But it's all, it all boils down to the song. It's not an index of people, it's an index of songs. And I put the people in as well. You see what, you see what I mean?

So again, we're in index nerd mode. So the, just to clarify the, so the index, the main, there's the folksong index, because there are other indexes. There's another one called the broadside index, which is actually bigger than this one. You can't define folksong. Or if, if you can, you're lying because there's, there is no real proper definition.

Steve Roud: My definition is that it's a song that was sung, was sung or is sung by ordinary people of their own volition. In other words, they're not being told to sing it by their church or their school or, or their political party. It's, they have chosen to sing this song in a non-commercial homegrown way. But it all boils down to ordinary people, what they choose to sing.

If there's evidence that people did choose to sing that song, then to me that's a folk song and it goes in the index and gets a number. Because there are hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions of songs now, but people didn't necessarily, they may have sang them for a short while, while they were, you know, a pop song comes along and then it goes away.

Steve Roud: If they choose to sing it and pass it on to each other, that's the key point, actually, because I missed out, then it's a folk song. Then it goes in the index and it's all based on, is there evidence of that occurring? But it is mainly historic because I start from the English tradition where the old-fashioned traditional singing died out.

Most mostly died out a number of years ago. It is mostly historical. It's not what people do nowadays in their folk bands and things. Somebody else can do that. I'm just interested in the traditional stuff. You use the word evidence. What sort of evidence is out there or what that you look for?

Steve Roud: That's another peculiarity of folk song. One of the things that librarians are meant to do, by the way, is you look at your User group, in other words, your index has got to be based on what people want, how they want it. But you also look at the characteristics of the subject material.

So the characteristics of the folk song from a librarian point of view are that the information is scattered all over the place. You can't go to one place to find your stuff. Folk songs are in books and on records. They're in manuscripts. They're in on sound, you know, tape recordings. It's on unpublished sound recordings.

Steve Roud: They're in newspapers and magazines. They're in any medium that you can think of has something about folk songs in it. So if you're doing the history, you don't just buy a book of folk songs, you buy Go online, get the local newspaper at the time the songs were sung because they'll tell you what was happening at the time.

In other words, the information is all over the place. So again, we're looking for evidence from as many perspectives as we can because the folksong collectors didn't collect everything, they just collected what they liked.

Steve Roud: So how are we going to find out what was going on in 1903? Cecil Sharp knocked on somebody's door and they knew 20 songs. He wrote down five of them. How do we get to that other 15? You know, we look for diaries, we look for autobiographies, we look for newspaper articles to get evidence from other sources.

Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. And that's one of, I think, My biggest joys in doing and looking into nursing rhymes is, is reading the everyday, and that's kind of what's gotten me interested. So, for example, one of the things that I guess really surprised me, I love the fact that you talked about that it could, it's Use in any medium was the use of nursery rhymes in early American political cartoons Like that was so fascinating to me because it never occurred to me that nursery rhymes could be used but they they were used very effectively because that's something that The everyday or the everyday person would recognize and therefore that's why it was so effective as a political cartoon.

Steve Roud: Yeah, and that's, in a way, that's the definition of folklore is that you can, the nursery rhyme is so well known that people recognize it straight away. They recognize the context. Yes, the fact that it's parodied. Is the point., you know, right. Humpty Dumpty. You know, according somebody, Humpty Dumpty, you've immediately got a picture in your head.

Mm-Hmm . But of course, if you come across that political cartoon, you can then use that to talk about the politics of the time, or you can then just use it as evidence that people knew that rhyme at the time. Exactly. It just provides so much, so much of an interesting perspective on different, on different lives and different, just the everyday rather than what makes it into the history books, I guess.

And that's, that's what I just find so interesting. And that's what I'm interested, as a folklorist, although I call myself an historian most of the time now, but as a folklorist, it is the everyday that I'm interested in.

Yes. I'm not interested in. what the politicians are doing, or the battles, or whatever, unless there's a song about it. I'm interested in what the ordinary person, you know, people like me and you, were doing at any given time.

Steve Roud: History from below, as they call it. Yes, yes. And you do have to dig around for history from below, you know, because it's not there necessarily straightforwardly in the history books. You have to look for the everyday. In in other sources. Absolutely, which makes it, it makes it really enjoyable when you find it, but also very frustrating.

Oh, it's frustrating, yes, but it's great fun. I mean, it is. The chase is often more interesting than the, than actually finding it in the end and, and you, you learn a lot about life going for things.

Steve Roud: The, the, uh, where are we in your list of things that the, Yeah. One of the problems with folklore, as a subject of study, if you like, and this, in this folklore, when I'm talking now, folklore includes folk song, which is my main, my main interest at the moment, but as you probably know, I've written on superstition, and on children's games, and on legends of London, and so on.

Steve Roud: So folklore covers all of those things. As a subject of study, it's too easy for people to just make things up. Yes. Now, if somebody just made something up in the past, Then it becomes folklore, right? Okay. But if you read nowadays, you know, Ring a Ring a Roses, or Ring a Ring a Rosie, as you would probably call it, children's rhyme, the big thing over here is that it comes from the plague.

Steve Roud: Mm hmm. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, Iona Opie said in the 60s, we were afraid to leave the house because people just kept telling us this thing. So the idea is that it comes from the plague. Stems from from the 1950s. I can't find anybody before that who said it. Maybe late 40s, but then it became so widespread that it becomes folklore in itself.

Right, because it's, it's a. A legend that's passed on. It's completely nonsense, right? And this is the trouble with nursery rhymes, is that people can make up any kind of nonsense, and then it gets passed on. As I say, it becomes folklore because that's interesting, but it ain't history.

Steve Roud: Right. And if you're a Romantic, you want to believe the folklore, or it goes back hundreds of years. It goes back to the plagues. No, it doesn't. It probably goes back to about 1870 and it might even be American, damn it. So if you're a Romantic, you want to believe that it goes back thousands of years, or it's pre-Christian, it's Pagans, you know, or it's Oliver Cromwell, whereas if you're a historian, you want to cut through that and say, actually, the evidence is.

The earliest we can find is 300 years after the last plague. Nobody mentioned it at the time. Kneesing was not a symptom of the plague. Mm hmm. Blah, blah, blah, blah. People don't like that because it's pricking their bubbles. Yep. As the historian, and especially for you working in the nursery rhyme end of the pres Over the spectrum where there's a long tradition of people just making things up.

Steve Roud: You've got to cut through all of that and you've got to be skeptical because the explanations that you're being given are folklore in themselves. It's an interesting layer. Right? Yeah, I, I did one of my earliest episodes was on, on Ring Around the Rosie, is how, how we say it, and I, I spend, I guess, a good 15 minutes ranting about that, is, you know, people making these things up, but I really love the fact that it does become folklore in itself, and so it just becomes its own story.

It's, it's, you know, its own thing to study. And because of the internet now. Yes. You know, fake, as we know, fake news. Mm hmm. Spread like wildfire. And. And people will go to the gallows, you know, they'll go, you know, they'll, they'll fight you, you know, if you say something that they, they, you know, might think to tell you, you know, so and so told me.

Steve Roud: It is quite difficult, as I say, being the folklorist who says, actually, no, it isn't. No, it doesn't. I always spend all my time saying, actually, no, it doesn't. I'm sorry. And they say, how do you know? And you say, well, because I've read about it, you know, 50 years doing. Anyway, I think I've got off the point.

No, these are, these are loose leaf questions. I'm, I'm very interested in knowing your opinion on these things. But going into this, how do songs get added to the list? I mean, you talked a little bit about that at the beginning, but these days Yeah, these days things have changed because it's cumulative.

Steve Roud: So I started off with English tradition and I gradually worked, the one good thing about being a librarian is you have access to interlibrary loans, and you have access gradually, you know, librarian of the Football Society at University College London. My daughter now works at Cambridge University Library, and so on.

So I, I have over the years had access to. The material I have my own collection of books and of commercial records and cassettes. You remember cassettes? Oh, I remember cassettes. Yeah, I regard CDs as a recent invention anyway. So over the years, I've just gradually worked through whatever I could get, buying, buy, buy, make, borrow or steal kind of thing, the material, whack it in and, you know, literally just sitting there.

Next song, turn the page, next song, turn the page. The Folk Song Index now stands at 360, 000 entries. And the Broadside Index, which is popular songs that are not folk songs, is about the same. So, added, added together, it's over 700, 000 records. All typed, nearly all typed by me. I did the English stuff, I've done a lot of American stuff because my, I, Thank you.

Steve Roud: My plan is to do the English speaking world, you know, everywhere, because I'm just as interested in American and Canadian as I am in British. So the way things stand at the moment is that I have done virtually, well, every English book on FolkSong that I can get hold of, you know, that exists basically.

And nearly all the manuscripts from the earlier collectors. Right. So England is virtually done. And I'm now working very hard on Irish material, and because I'm now a bit better known than I used to be, I now know the librarians at the Irish Traditional Music Archive, so they give me access to their catalogue, you know, special access.

Steve Roud: I'm trusted to look at things that other people don't look at. So I now index their catalogue, if you know what I mean. Because what I want my index to be is the portal to all the catalogues, all the books, all the indexes. One place where you can Find the folks on you're interested in so things get added literally every day.

Well, except when you know Even when I'm on holiday, but a lot of my time on I don't drive so I spend a lot of time on trains and Again, they invented the laptop just for me just for you Yep for me because I can I can index while while on the train quite happily Nearly every day of my life, I spend at least a few hours, um, indexing something or other, either a book that's just come out or an online site, because things keep popping up online, of course.

Oh, absolutely. And I index those as well. Then they disappear again, and it makes me cross because my links don't work anymore. But there should be a law against that. But things get added bit by bit, one by one, one song at a time. On an average day I can do about a hundred songs, probably. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

Steve Roud: So the English is done, the Irish is pretty good, the Americans, I've done all the main books, all the old state collections, you know, folk songs of Texas, folk songs of California, that kind of thing. But I'm now trying to get access to the unpublished collection, the same with the Canadian ones, because if they're not Indexed or catalogued.

Then I have to go there. Yes. Yes. Because I don't have staff that I can send. And I'm 75 and retired so I can't go there. I have to wait until somebody on site does a list or a hand list or a rough index and then I can work from that sort of thing. Theoretically, as I say, bit by bit which I am chipping through the tradition.