In the 90’s I stood on the streets of Tucson, Arizona with a bucket full of pvc flutes that I had made, and I had many more laughs than I had sales @ $15/flute. This week I heard from a customer in Paris, France who is using my low flutes for a new CD. I also received orders from Mirrabooka, Western Australia, Aberdeen, Hong Kong, Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and Toronto, Canada. Clearly, with the advent of the personal computer and the internet, the simple-system flute and Irish music is becoming more popular world-wide. Where do we go from here, I really have no idea.
Quo vadimus? Per aspera ad astra…
That is way cool, Doug. I know I wouldn’t be playing Itrad if it weren’t for the internet. “Ab obice saevior ibit…”
Way to go Doug!
Although I really don’t think of you as ferocious in your pursuit of advancing flutering. . (Ab obice saevior ibit. . ..
Bob
Was fun to read today:) - The Greening of Red Square
The Internet was sure the key to it all for me too. I’d been making flutes since the mid seventies, but in a large but sparsely populated country like Australia, how would anyone know? So, I had a good stock of flutes in hand when the Internet reached the point I thought it worth embarking on to. I put up about half a page of information, of a more philosophical nature than practical - no images, no sounds, no real details. Next day I had an order from Hawaii! A few weeks later and I had no stock. A few months later and I was flat out upgrading the workshop, and a year or two later had to give up the day job in community radio. Now I’ve had to close my books to try to clear my backlog. THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!
(Well, I’d actually settle for “slow down a bit”!)
I find it amusing that it’s us old-fashioned folkies that seem to have made the fullest use of the Internet. I explained to one of my Jazz colleagues what the ABC system was, and how folkies use it to share tunes around the world. He was nonplussed - in his view at least, Jazz players would never go out of their way to share their material.
Terry
Congrats Doug!
Same for me. The Internet is great. Yesterday an order from an American living in Uganda, and another one from a famous American pop musician who plays one of my flutes already. Even in this economy, I’m still never able to catch up to all of my orders.
Terry, as far as Jazz musicians not sharing their material, that certainly isn’t true, as far as Gypsy Jazz music is concerned. There are all sorts of great sites where playing style, technique, etc. is shared and discussed, and a few great subscription sites where some of the current guitar masters such as Stochelo Rosenberg are sharing in intricate detail their playing styles and techniques. I’ve subscribed to his “Rosenberg Academy” and its a fantastic resource. I just wish I had more time to apply to it but flute making has been keeping me pretty busy as of late!
Casey
Hi Terry
I don’t find it funny - when you look at the demographics of “Folkies” (I am using the British / Australian definition here, not the US definition of Folkie) You will most likely find one of the highest educational standards of any musical grouping, with scientific and technical subjects very well represented.
David (BSc - Physics, BA - Enginering and Psychology, BA(hons) - Mathematics, MSc - Energy and Enviromental Management)
Isn’t this the genre that invented the fakebook? The tech is out by a generation or so, but the spirit is the same.
That’s comforting, Casey. This chap is into contemporary jazz, so I don’t know if that is more competitive, less cooperative than other forms. I said “in his view at least” as it’s also perfectly possible that he really meant that he personally would never dream of sharing!
I agree, BigDavy, folkies are not always what we seem. That’s probably one of the bits I find amusing. Perhaps it begs the question why are such well-educated people interested, even passionate, about music of the uneducated classes. But I’d better not hijack Doug’s thread!
Terry
Go ahead, Terry. That’s a question worth investigating.
I am not exactly thrilled by this, even though I don’t exactly know what it means.
…music of the uneducated classes…
" Perhaps it begs the question why are such well-educated people interested, even passionate, about music of the uneducated classes." Terry McGee.
Woody Guthrie I believe coined the phrase “educated fools”. That a person has a degree, or wears a suit and tie is certainly no guaranty that any music that emanates from them
will be any good.
I think it means farmers, blue collar workers, rural people, etc. Basically the ones who are not educated in institutions of higher learning but in many cases tend to have far more common sense than their well-educated counterparts. 
cheers,
Kirk
“I think it means farmers, blue collar workers, rural people, etc. Basically the ones who are not educated in institutions of higher learning but in many cases tend to have far more common sense than their well-educated counterparts.” Kirk B.
Wearing muddy wellies doesn’t make you a good musician either, or even a son of the soil, however much you hug your cheap whistle to your leather britches.
I was involved in the folk song revival of the 60’s here in the USA. I played the guitar and sang in coffee houses that surrounded the University campus. Most of the songs that I sang I learned from listening to records, some of them not so authentic, I’m afraid. I had the good fortune of sharing the stage one night with Pete Seeger at the “Quiet Answer” coffee house in Bloomington, Indiana. It was an accident, actually, since Pete had just arrived in town for a concert the following night. When Pete walked in the door, I put down my guitar and became a listener. I like to say that I shared the stage, but, in truth, although I did share the stage with Pete, it wasn’t at the same time. Yes, I know that I have told this story before. I even gave my wife the same Valentine’s Day card that I gave her a few years ago. I thought that it looked familiar.
I certainly don’t know much about ethnomusicology, but I’m guessing that if you tried to diagram the musical influences of what we call folk music, the diagram would soon look like a massive tree with branches going every which way: big city urban, mountain country, Nashville, blues, international, for example. With the coming of the internet and easy access to “world music”, the whole folk situation becomes even more complicated.
I sent some tapes of songs that I had written to Nashville back in the 80’s. I think that the record producers in Nashville must have had a good laugh, just like we now do when we listen to some of the hopefuls on “American Idol”, a popular singing talent show. Needless to say, my tapes came back with a rejection letter. When I go back and listen to those songs now, I can understand why. It’s obvious that some of the “Idol” contestants think that they are pretty good, too much so in my opinion.
two cents… it always seems difficult, to me, when people deal in stereotypes, and that is what this question seems like to me. stereotypes dealing with arbitrarily or undefined terms. musicians are not by definition only those with music degrees, conversely the lack of a music degree does not mean one is not a musician. so to look at the question of “why are the educated interested in the music of the uneducated?” you have to get past some of those undefined words in the question, the definition of which is assumed to be known…
what is the music of the uneducated? what is the music of the educated? what is educated? what is uneducated? are any of these mutually exclusive? can a person be educated and still enjoy the music of the uneducated? etc etc etc… chasing the answer to the question posed will most likely tell you more about the folks posting than about the answer to a question that really can’t be answered due to its inherent subjectivity… does one answer from the perspective of the uneducated or the educated… musician or non musician… folkie or not folkie…
when it’s all said and done… you’re no closer to an answer to the unanswerable question… and… it’s time you could have spent making music…
in the meantime, it will be interesting to read the answers posted…
be well,
jim
I don’t like Terry’s use of the term “uneducated classes” that’s all. I wouldn’t call people living in rural areas, or working class men and women, uneducated. There are different kinds of smarts and skills. A farmer in Clare would certainly know lots of stuff a Dublin academic would be totally ignorant of.
As Huddie Ledbetter said folk music is played by folk - country people, townspeople, farmers, students, doctors, the unemployed, policemen, old ladies etc., not horses.
Why shouldn’t an academic type be interested in Irish traditional music which has such a wealth of fine, interesting, amazing tunes and songs that more than equal the soppy sonatas, divertimentos and arias of the "so called educated classes? Gordon Bennett 
Lord love a duck etc. 
Was it, in the past, as in much of the world today, the music of the did-not-get-the-opportunity-to-be-educated classes ? They may have had a lot of creative energy and intellectual curiosity* available, even after a day in the fields or factory.
And no internet 
- Edit: quoting Nano on a nearby thread “human nature, curiosity, the drive to make music, and the ingenuity to get it done”