Jim
My definitions are not rooted in the market place, but they do, however, attempt to take account of the legal situation - which yours doesn't.

You suggested yourself that the term traditional was redundant - partly because the process which gave it that name is now so pulluted by technology as to have ceased working, and partly because so many people have decided it means something else that there's no point in sticking to the old definition.

A man may call a knife a spoon if he wishes. He will be misunderstood - but only until a majority of the people he speaks to make the same change. Then the language will have changed, and his term will be the correct one. Now THAT's a folk process!

The standard historical definition had its place, at the time it was defined. At that point the music it described was developed in isolation. Songs existed like species in an ecosystem. Sometimes the newts found a new pond and then a new community would spring up, and some of the newts made it back over the hill to add their gene-pool back into the old strain - and so the songs developed.

The process was slow and - assuming one had a time machine - relatively easy to trace back to the original maker.

But 100 years ago all that changed. First of audio recording, then radio, gramaphone records, CDs and now the internet, made the passing of songs lateral as well as linear - to create a much much more complex 'folk process.'

It didn't happen overnight, which is why people went on using the term Traditional without noticing what was happening to the word. And they were happy to include in thier definition all manner of aspects which lay outwith the 'official' definition.

Now we have a situation where only a tiny minority of people even know what the 'official' definition is. Read this tread again, and you can see how confused the picture now is.

I recognise your definition. But if you merely use the word Traditional, many people will misunderstand you - because they mean something else by the word.

If you were happy to change your term to one that has, for now, not lost its meaning - for example 'collected' everyone would know what you meant.

It's a pain, and maybe a shame - but that's language for you all over!

PS can you clarify the Reilly / Munnelly / Coulter route for me? I'm not sure I follow what happened. Has Coulter got copyright of the work (impossible in the UK - well, the courts would have to sort it), or only of his arrangement of the song?

PPS Walter was right when he was referring to songs that come to him the way they did. But he'd not have said the same thing about a song written (assuming it could have been in his repertoire) by Paul McCartney!

PPPS Agian, your defintion: "created (largely anonymously), transmitted (largely orally) and altered and re-shaped to suit the people who performed them" only works pre-audio recording technology. It doesn't hold water today - and anyway, a lot of songs even back then WERE written down, both by writers and by 'unofficial' collectors - and that's one of the ways the newts multiplied!