Folklorists doing fieldwork may be looking for specific genres or kinds of folk behavior: ballads, recipes, survivals of older traditions in modem commur nities, modern folkways in technological communities, or the nature of folk performance. It is difficult to know the social meaning of an item of perforr mance without knowing about the conditions of performance. For example, the place and function of ballads in a community are interpreted differently if many people in that community sing many long ballads on a regular basis to a wide local audience that knows and enjoys such ballads or if, by contrast, the performers sing their songs only when collectors come in from the outside to solicit them. The words and tunes may be the same, but what we make of them may vary. One may analyze a particular ballad text differently if it was lcarncd from a book, a recording, a school chum, or a grandparent.