"Should folk music be a definitive kind of thing, like a modern day record/recording, or should a creation within this genre be ever changing and ever interpreted and always lend itself to creativity."

Well, John, if the fear is that recording a song will set it in concrete and prevent it from evolving further, I don't see that actually happening. Some of the songs I sing, I learned directly from other people, but the vast majority of my repertoire comes from song books and recordings. If I hear someone sing a song, say, at a song fest or in a concert and I want to learn it, but I can't learn it directly from the person who sang it, then assuming it's a traditional song and not something the person wrote, if I dig a bit, more often than not I can find a version of it in a song book (one of the more serious collections, like Sharp or Lomax). Or these days, if I remember a line or two from the song, I can fire up the computer, google it, and usually find it, or at least a version of it. BUT—I rarely find it exactly as I first heard it.

At this point, what I generally do is assemble as many versions of the song as I can find, and either try to reconstruct it as best I can as I first heard it, or take a bit from here and something else from there, and cobble together a version of my own.

But even if I were able to get the song verbatim from the person I first heard sing it, I usually discover some time later that I'm not singing it exactly the way I learned it, without necessarily intending to make changes in it. It just happens. Then someone learns it from me, and they do the same thing.

Don't think that a person should make indiscriminate changes in traditional songs, but I do believe in the "minstrel's prerogative:"   that if, for example, a line sings awkwardly, it's perfectly all right to make a few carefully thought out changes, as long as I don't change the essential meaning of the line. And I've noticed that among most of the singers I know, they tend to do the same thing.

So interpretation and creativity are still there, as is the ever-changing nature of the songs. Time was when people learned songs from each other directly, by word of mouth. But now that many people are learning their songs from song books and recordings, the folk process hasn't really changed that much. The book or the record may be a different kind of link in the chain, but still, it's only a link.

If it weren't for song books and recordings, most of us city-billys wouldn't have much to sing, except what we hear on the radio.

Now there's a horrible thought!!

Don Firth