Old Time Radio, Pete Seeger and spam

Originally published in FoT Issue 96: Jul-Sep 2003

With your permission, gentle reader, I will begin by going off-topic - because this item, just for a change, has nothing to do with folk music. If you can remember when Sunday lunch was a time for the family to get together, eat roast dinner and listen to the Clitheroe Kid on the wireless, RadioLovers.com is a must for your favourites list. It is an American site, offering “old time radio shows” which can be downloaded for free, so the likes of “Amos & Andy”, “Bing Crosby Entertains” and “I Love Lucy” are all here. But it also includes “Educating Archie”, “Frankie Howerd” and - yes, you’ve guessed it - “The Clitheroe Kid”.

Presumably there is a copyright issue here. The site gets round it (and I can forgive myself for listening to it) by stating that it believes the copyrights have lapsed or didn’t exist to begin with, and in any case doesn’t charge for downloading or access to the site, but is “just trying to bring the exciting world of Old Time Radio to a whole new generation of listeners”. And it offers to remove any recording which can be shown to violate copyright. I just hope the suits at the BBC don’t find out or they’re bound to object. In fact - please forget that I ever told you about the site. The Beeb also has its own nostalgiafest on BBC7, a digital radio channel where you can listen to old episodes of “The Goon Show”, “I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again” and “Round the Horne”, where of course you can hear the traditional ballads of Rambling Sid Rumpo. So you can see I have almost brought myself back on-topic again.

And indeed as I write this, I am listening - thanks to the Internet - to the fine Radio 4 programme “Across the Divide 2”, which I missed when it was broadcast in May, but which remains available for seven days on the Web. Bob Copper interviewing Pete Seeger. One legend chatting to another. Folk music heaven! By the time you read this it will be long gone, but there are always a few gems around, and with Internet radio you are not limited to your own area when it comes to the regional broadcasts - though the powers that be have axed without warning a Radio Humberside folk programme, Henry Ayrton’s “Folk and Roots Show”. Thanks to the Web, the likes of Terry Wogan and John Peel get emails from listeners in Florida - but it works just as well for we southerners if we want to listen for instance to any of Radio Scotland’s folk programmes - and they are many.

Speaking of Pete Seeger - I was, wasn’t I? - Jim Capaldi runs a fabulous site dedicated to the man, the music, the monument. Not *the* Jim Capaldi you understand, just *a* Jim Capaldi. An unofficial web site, it is clearly a labour of love, but gathers together a wealth of material about Pete and you can even download some of his songs. It is worth looking at just to read the comments page. Harry Belafonte got it right at Pete’s 1996 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, when he said: “If they ever decide to put a fifth face on Mount Rushmore, I would nominate Pete Seeger. He is one of the great sons of this country.” Rock and Roll? Well I ain’t ever heard no horse sing it.

There - have you noticed the way I have seamlessly arrived on-topic? Folk on the Internet indeed. And here is one of the most interesting, if bizarre, examples of the use of online folk music I have found. If you have an email account, you will probably have noticed the recent increase in spam. If you don’t, I had better explain that these days the term “spam” means Internet abuse, particularly unsolicited email and junk postings to newsgroups. It was 25 years ago this May, when there were only a couple of thousand people on what was called the Arpanet, that someone realised that instead of sending 600 emails to invite people to see some computer systems being demonstrated, he could send one email to all 600 of them. His name was Gary Thuerk (pronounced Turk) and he was in marketing. Hmmph. As the Arpanet was intended for scientific research purposes only, he got into big trouble. He was reprimanded. When the Internet came along and his idea had been seen to have worked (his company sold 20 computer systems - at about $1million each) advertisers quickly realised they could use mass emailing software (which had been around for decades to handle mailing lists) and use it to send junk email to large audiences who hadn’t asked for it. Which is why more and more Internet users are finding their email accounts almost impossible to handle.

In January, more than half of the email arriving at the world’s biggest Internet service provider, AOL, was spam. By May it was rising above 80%, or more than 2.5 billion pieces of spam a day. Other ISPs said the same - Yahoo was handling five times more spam than a year ago. I receive around 50 emails a day, 45 of which go straight into the trash. I am offered ways to make $$$cash$$$, guaranteed enlargement of certain body parts - unmentionable - and reduction of others - weight or wrinkles. I can get credit, a university degree and - gosh, how exciting - 80% off PRINTER CARTRIDGES. Not to mention all the porn I want. (I said not to mention all the porn I want!) Go away for a couple of weeks and there could be 700 emails in your inbox. You can see why people are giving up on their email accounts. Try looking for something important in that lot.

The reason for this year’s sudden increase in spam rather perversely is down to the successful blocking of it by ISPs. A spammer used to send 100,000 emails touting, say, generic Viagra in the hopes of getting one reply. If 90,000 of those emails are now being blocked, he needs to send out a million emails just to find that one customer and keep his response rate the same. Did I say that I was on-topic? So where does folk music come in? Anti-spam - “You know, if one person, just one person, does it, they may think you’re really lame and won’t take you off their spam list. And if two people do it - in harmony - they may think you’re both jerks and they won’t take either of you off the spam list. And if three people do it! Can you imagine three people hittin’ Reply, typin’ a bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and hittin’ Send? They may think it’s an organisation! And can you imagine ten per cent of spam victims per message? I said two hundred thousand replies per message - hittin’ Reply, typin’ a bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and hittin’ Send? They may think it’s a MOVEMENT, and that’s what it is: THE ALICE’S RESTAURANT ANTI-SPAM MASSACRE MOVEMENT!”

The ARA-SMM claims to have actually had spammers closed down. It’s a dangerous tactic, because one of the last things you want to do is reply to a spammer. Then he knows you have an active email address. But if everybody did it... Who was it who sang ‘We Shall Overcome’?