Thanks George. I appreciate your compliment.

M Ted, Most folklorists would disagree that a folk song would not be changed over a period of time. Variants.

Communicators may want to keep some elements of a song in tact. But not all of them. And not the whole song.

I agree with the statement about evoking a sense of history or past without specifically referring to a historical incident. It might be a mythological theme rather than an actual event or an event that's been elaborated on to idealize say Jesse James or Billy the Kid. Nobody knows who the real John Henry or Casey Jones was but they have an idea about some of the people who the legends were based on.

Much of Woody's work did come after he left his environment but he still carried those musical elements with him. These are written songs and perhaps like "This Land" budding folk songs. Time will tell.

Woody was thrown out of the CP. He was too radical. His songs are consistent with his social views. He was never a slave to any party line. In those days, many were naive about Stalin. There was an idealism in the air. Nobody in the folk music world that I knew took orders from the Kremlin.

In dealing with the use of songs for any propaganda purposes, we have to determine if this is the case. Then we have to prove it. A song used explicitly for propaganda purposes has a very short shelf life unless it is a national anthem which is usually composed and never changed like a folk song.

Many of the songs created by the left-wing movement were not folk songs but based on folk material. And some in the case of the Little Red Songbook of the IWW were based on popular songs of the day and written as parodies. There may be some songs that emanate from the labor struggles of the past such as coal mining songs that are closer to the folk tradition. I maintain that a song like "If I Had A Hammer" is not a folk song but a composed song that had popularity in the left-wing community for a period of time.

I lived in the Village and observed the Bohemian community during the 50's. Many were as far away from Bob Dylan as you could get. There was an interest in Jazz and there were the folkies in Washington Square, some of whom thought Dylan was not so hot. He, by no means, would have reflected the views of the people I knew in that circle at that time.

Later in the 60's there was a self-conscious attempt to define that community in New York as a "folk community" but seeing what happened to the popularity of music after this flurry before the "folk scare", when young people embraced the Beatles and rock and roll, there is little to support any generational connection of a folk tradition.

The popular misconception of folk music is tied to all kinds of performers these days from John Denver to the Indigo Girls.

The attempt to redefine folk music is a self-conscious effort on the part of the music industry, music show business practioners and ancillary participants to sell their product. This has nothing to do with traditional folk music.

Frank Hamilton