He touched my arm and motioned for me to stop singing. “You said ’staff.’ It’s not staff. T’is stave.” “It’s the same thing, isn’t it? A long stick?” “It doesn’t matter. Stave is what was sung to you, and stave you must say.”

“When you are given a song that has been handed along from singer to singer over the years, you are entrusted with it, for it is he work of folk who are gone now. Their song. Not yours. It is not your place to change it. You must pass it along to others, and keep it as good as you found it. Sing it as you got it or not at all. Go again.”

“The Songcatcher,” Sharyn McCrumb, pages 48, 49.