Walter Armitage Justice Ford

“ Art is the product of the human intellect, which has set itself to train and develop what was originally only a natural instinct. In folk-song we have the results of natural instinct itself unconsciously, unreflectively developed through endless centuries. ”

“ What are folk-songs as we know them to-day? The songs which have been taken down from the lips of the peasantry, mostly in very recent years. They owe their preservation to the tenacious memories of country folk through countless generations. In other words, they are traditional.
They are to be found in all nations, savage or civilized, all over the world. And in civilized nations the melodies of folk-song have been little affected by the musical changes which civilization has brought to the art of music. ”

“ Through the voice, the race of man has fashioned for his use two languages—the one of speech, by which we communicate our needs, our thoughts, our experience to one another, and without which no civilized life in communities is possible; the other, the language of melody, by which we express all those thing. ”

“ Many of you possess a violin or a piano, or some musical instrument; but there is only one musical instrument which everyone possesses and has always possessed—the voice. Such a gift was not given without the intention that we should all use it, and use it, as the inferior manufactured instruments are used, for music. ”

“ If, then, with the voice is given also the instinct, to use it, to sing is not an exceptional, but the normal thing to do. Only abnormal or unnatural conditions, such as prevail in what we call civilisation, prevent singing from being a universal habit. ”

“ It is only a living thing, an essential part of human life, now to an aged peasant here and there who cherishes what his father and grandfather sang before him, or in peasant communities, such as that one which Mr. Cecil Sharp visited in the Apalachian Mountains, where civilized music and musical instruments have not yet penetrated, and where men, women and children all sing, and sing the songs brought by their forbears from England 300 years ago. ”