Here is the original singer. He has existed all over the world in every age, probably, since civilization began to dawn. We are very wrong in thinking of songs as normally written by special composers and sung by special singers in concert halls. Such a situation is not the usual but the unusual one. For, generally speaking, it is not special people who are singers but ordinary people. Artists have been in the habit of thinking that the world is divided into ordinary men and artists. William Morris startled them by declaring that ordinary men _are_ artists--that to be artistic is the normal condition of ordinary men. It is only our materialistic civilization, he said, that has made men inartistic. And historically, at least, he is quite right. It is only in recent times, and in certain nations, that it has come to be regarded as unusual that an ordinary man should be a singer. In all other ages, we may safely say, and in nearly all nations, it was regarded as unusual that an ordinary man should _not_ be a singer. Singing has always been as natural to man as running, or whistling, or making love. It is only in these latter times that a man who sings for the joy of it is thought ‘queer.’ The songs that have been written down on paper are of course only the smallest fraction of those that have been invented. It is a very unusual adventure for a song to get written down on paper. Not one out of a thousand experiences it. Most songs are ‘made up’ by some ordinary person at work or at play, remembered and repeated, imitated by some one else and changed a little and passed on. They live from mouth to mouth and in the hearts of people. Every nation, until it became too lettered and too self-conscious, had its songs of this kind, many of them beautiful enough to be known by thousands of people, some the property of only a few. In Italy investigators have recently noted down thousands of songs that never touched paper before, but they were only a tiny part of the songs that were passing from mouth to mouth. So it has been in every country. Greenland and Iceland have their songs which originated no one knows where or when. We possess folk-songs of China, Japan, and India. The phonograph has noted down hundreds of songs of the North American Indians. And every country in Europe has yielded songs innumerable.