Truly said. I had someone write me quite angrily because they refused to believe I'll Take You Home Kathleen was written by an American in Illinois!

The trouble is do you not consider a song Irish/English/Scottish because it originated elsewhere? The origin of so many tunes is lost and many more became popular throughout most of GB.

The reason I don't sort my pages by country like everyone else does is because too many tunes have cross-pollinated. To put them in a single country list seemed like a straight jacket to me. So I made up my own categories and adapted a search engine that allows searches by country - but it gives everything that was popular in a country - not just what originated there. The information on the tune will have that (if I know it).

To sum up, I suppose my feeling is that yes, I want to know the origin (and history) of a folk tune - but "folk" by definition, I believe, means music that was popular in a culture - wherever it came from.

Which leads me back to the fact that I would still prefer one broad British Folk category than to have duplicate links in an English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, etc. link category. Seems more efficient to me. Else instead of having one link for Taylor's Traditional Tunebook there were be separate links for the Scottish page, the Irish page, etc. More work to enter and more work to maintain.

All that said I don't think it's a problem to do it either way. Far be it from me to organize someone else's thinking when I can't organize my own some of the time!