The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #81152   Message #1484520
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
13-May-05 - 07:11 PM
Thread Name: Origins: Do they matter
Subject: RE: Origins: Do they matter
Origins are interesting - but the idea that the origin implies some kind of exclusive ownership that holds it diwn in one time and place is nonsense.

More often than not it's not a matter of origins, it's a matter of sources. A source is where a particular song, or a particular version of a song came from. But typically there will have been some earlier source from which some song that helped give rise to that version came, and so on down the line.

Even when a song has an identifiable individual who wrote it, that person will have have had all kinds of influences from earlier somgs and earlier singers.

There are plants growing in our gardens that came originally from all over the world. But I've never heard about Americans getting all patriotic and exclusive about potatoes, or people over here scorning them as decadent foreign importd that we ought to avoid.