In this paper, we are interested in the relationship between liaison and writing, both in terms of acquisition and among illiterate speakers, noting some unconventional spellings along the way. In particular, we examine a sample of 498 songs (18hrs 23 mins, 89.853 words, 5.787 liaison sites) taken from the Jean Dumas collection, an ethnomusicology corpus recorded in France in the 1960s. In this collection, liaisons are particularly realized, which is quite striking given that these songs were orally transmitted among singers with low or no literacy, but also pataquès (liaisons realized in unexpected contexts), which might be linked to an absence of normative pressure from the written form. The singers seem nonetheless to perceive some of the linguistic subtleties which are generally accessed via the written form, such as the fact that [t] liaisons usually occur after verbs conjugated in the third person.