For what it's worth, I wasn't offended by Suibhne's post addressing what I said, simply bemused. There didn't seem to be anything offensive, but I really could make no sense of it, so I didn't bother to reply.

One of the principle conceits one encounters among Folkies is that what they are doing is somehow keeping The Tradition alive. I dispute this with very good reason as The Tradition (as far as it existed at all) was a) something very different indeed; and b) is well dead anyway; and c) is something we have no clear understanding of bar a few scraps left in the fossil record.

Even with all the assembled & wondrous archives of Child, Roud, Max Hunter, Alan Lomax, VOTP, Folktrax et al we're still just standing in the empty ruins of Pompeii trying to imagine what life these songs once had before the mechanisations & machinations of the 19th / 20th centuries either collected them or wiped the slate clean. The Revival is born from the former, thus socially, economically, politically, culturally, functionally the two things couldn't really be more different.

Folk is a dream predicated on certain assumptions; for the most part I'd have to say it was a good dream, engendering as much very essential creative work as MOR reactionary crap. It's a dream that has both beguiled & baffled me since I was a boy; but never once was I under any illusion as to the nature of its reality. Whilst I am as fond of its beauty & richness as the next woman or man, I'm under no illusions that Folk perpetuates The Tradition in exactly the same way model railways perpetuate The Age of Steam.

Of course most Folk doesn't claim to do this at all; most of us just get on with it because we love it. We're not breathing new life into the old songs, rather the old songs are breathing new life into us. In singing an old song we're communing with something essentially unsayable, which is what precisely what Folk is. Very different to what it thinks it is for sure...