M Ted, I think you've asked a very important question. It may be the key to the discussion about what is folk mmusic. "How can a folksong be a folksong when it goes through the folk process?" I recall Sam Hinton's quote of Charles Seeger's metaphor, "A folk song on record or in a book is a snapshot of a bird in flight."

The "folk process" I believe is misunderstood. Changing a folk song around arbitrarilly in my view does not necessarilly indicate a "folk process". In order for a variant to be sucessful in it's change, it has to not only be acceptable to that cultural community from whence the changer comes, it has to be created by someone who has assimilated those cultural nuances by being part of that musical culture so thoroughly that the history of that culture continues in the creating of the "new" version. This is the key. It's not writing for a marketplace that creates this new variant as in pop music. It comes out of the context of a specific tradition. When song variants are written about coal miners by someone who has come out of that tradition and comments on the prevalent time he/she finds him/herself in order to reflect the values of that community, I would call this a budding folk song, It matures as it is accepted by the community and is passed down through generations.

Woody Guthrie is close to his roots. The songs that he wrote which were contemporaneous with his time may well pass into aural tradition. The reasons that they may become folk music is that he was in touch with his musical/cultural tradition. Most of the music for the songs that he composed can be traced to earlier tunes. He borrowed heavilly on his roots and the songs of the Carter Family. Bob Dylan attempted to do the same thing. He used "Nottamun Town" for his "Masters of War" and "Patriot's Game" for "God On Our Side". Even the first part of the tune "Blowin' In the Wind" sounds similar to the first part of the Nova Scotian melody of "Marianne". The difference between Dylan and Woody is this. Woody came from a specific cultural sub-group, the Oklahoma share cropper community which assimilated rural music by country performers through a birth right. Dylan used eclectic tunes for his poetic statements and fused them with a show business image as a youthful rebel which caught on with the young people at the time. Dylan was never a part of a spcific folk culture. As a matter of fact, he appropriated Woody's style, garb, vocal mannerisms and references in a self-conscious way because it served him on stage. He abandoned that later when the music market changed. The fact that he is a talented songwriter and performer is irrelevant to the discussion of what is folk.

Frank Hamilton