Whilst source singers and revival singers are fairly easy to define and identify there are a number of singers who have/had a foot firmly planted in both areas. Bob Copper is probably the best example. He was source singer, collector, and revival. Even somebody like Fred Jordan who initially sang his family songs, learnt songs as part of the revival and was heavily influenced by the revival and was in some ways a parody of himself. Some of the singers who we think of today as source singers started out learning their songs from their own culture, but now are more involved in the revival. Jim was right about England, there are are now very few purely source singers left alive. Even the Scottish travellers have for a long while been heavily influenced by the revival, some of the more celebrated augmenting their ballads with versions from books. These are not criticisms, merely observations. The revival is a new tradition, but it is a tradition, and it has its own peculiarities mostly quite different from the older oral tradition.
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