"If he can't be original why bother?" That's a quote from a comment in a current thread about a song. The song in question The lonesome death of Rachel Corrie was one where the writer, Billy Bragg had very deliberately, and, it seemed to me, for very good reasons, modelled his song on an already existing song.

Now I'm not trying to transfer the argument about this particular song over to this thread. But I think the comment that came back "If he can't be original why bother?", and the assumption underlying it, does open up an interesting issue.

It seems to me that there is a contradiction between the assumption that originality must be a central quality of any artistic endeavour and the principle that folk music and folk song is about building on tradition, and on building a tradition. Since people are different, originality is going to enter into how they do that, but my belief is that is a secondary thing. It happens and it's good that it happens, but it's not the object of the exercise - and there are times when it should deliberately be resisted.