The idea is quite simple. I read a book by Will Hodgkinson that outlined a trip to collect music around the British Isles, in true Cecil Sharpe manner. With modern digital recorder in hand, off he went, but I think he missed a trick or two and yet, I don’t have the time necessary to prove my theory. I can’t get in the car and just go prove that I could do it better, so I gave up on the idea of being the next best thing to Alan or John Lomax, or Moses Asch. Then I asked myself the questions…. how would I have to do this in order to make it work? I’d need to do it from my virtual armchair. Could you be a recorder of Folk music, or rather people’s music from all over the world without leaving the confines of your own living room? Then it struck me. What if I started with someone I knew, asked them to record a song, or give me something they’d already done, with a little blurb about who they were and what they’d done, and then send me to the next link in the chain by helping me to contact, or contacting on my behalf someone else who made music.With the network provided by the Worldwide Web this would be possible for the first time since people began to make music on horses jawbones… it seemed like an interesting idea to me. This process it occurred to me would lead me to somewhere I could never expect, to places I wouldn’t take myself. If I offered the blurb and the music (as a download) then others could follow the ‘Musical Traces’, hence the name of this blog. So – That’s what I’m going to do, collect music without ever leaving my house… without wearing out shoe leather I’ll be a modern day Alan Lomax. No I won’t be documenting, no I won’t be transcribing, like he did, or archiving, or leaving music to dry up in a museum vault, but I will be collecting, and hopefully you will be hearing. It will all be Folk music that you hear, because whatever the music, it will be music of the people, made by the people. Mike Murphy January 2010more