To confine myself to Cristian's original questions, without getting bogged down in arguments aired already on Mudcat at great length......

1. "to what extent text based representation encourages the transmission of Folk traditions...."

Text has encouraged the transmission of traditional song for hundreds of years. Printed broadsides are now accepted as having had a much greater influence on traditional singers than they were in the days when I was led to believe that the whole process was one of "word of mouth". Some of the best traditional singers kept collections of broadsides. On Fred Hamer's "Leaves of Life" collection you can hear one old singer explaining how he bought printed texts on the market place and made up his own tunes (although you might argue about the latter claim).

In terms of the Folk Revival, books like the ones Jim listed ("Marrow Bones", etc.) have been enormously influential on singers' repertoire. The key to this is accessibility. Those books were easily available once, but are now out of print (though being considered for reprint). The whole point of EFDSS reprinting new editions of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs and selections from Cecil Sharp is to make that kind of resource generally available once again. The Child Ballads can be obtained in a reasonably priced new edition, but if you want tunes for them the place to look is in Bronson's Traditional Tunes to the Child Ballads, which is very hard to get hold of unless you have access to a specialist library. On the other had, the internet is making all kinds of interesting collections availble online, and let's not forget the Digital Tradition resource on this very site.

2. "would they learn it aurally in the age old tradition...."

If by that you mean "learn it from someone else's singing" then the only opportunity to do that (unless you're a song collector working amidst the last redoubts of traditional singing) is to steal it from someone else at your local folk club. If you want to learn a song from a *traditional* singer, and absorb at least something of their style, then there's the aforementioned Voice of the People collection and any number of CDs containing songs by the greats (Larner, Tanner, Cox, Lizzie Higgins, etc. etc.). I would guess that many professional singers use a mixture of book study and source recordings to gain new material (that's what I do, but then I have the time to do it), but a lot of the songs that get sung in folk clubs and sessions have most likely been learned from recordings of modern folk revival singers. Some of us wish that more people would dig a bit deeper!

3. "how far it is acceptable or necessary to adapt and interpret a traditional song in your own way...."

When I first got interested in traditional song the conventional view seemed to be that real traditional singers sang deadpan, with no personal expression, and that the rest of us should do the same. 'Letting the song tell its own story'. The first time I heard recordings of Sam Larner and Phil Tanner was sufficent to disabuse me of this notion. On the other hand, trying to "make the song your own" by drowning it in a hundred personal quirks risks putting yourself in front of the song, which isn't the idea at all. But whatever you do in terms of phrasing, expression or ornament represents an individual interpretation of a song, and that's before we even consider accompaniments, be they simple and understated or wildly experimental. What is "acceptable" is a subjective and ever-changing judgement, though I don't doubt all of us have our own (probably strong) ideas on the subject.

"whether it is predominantly the words and the melody that convey the folk tradition and how important harmony is...."

In terms of the kind of singers I've already mentioned, harmony was not important at all (though I have wondered whether any of them heard harmony in their heads, in the way I sometimes do even when singing unaccompanied). The Copper Family were and are a glorious exception, while the traditional village carols sung in harmony are owe much to more formal music-making. We live in a different world to Phil Tanner's, and we are exposed to an awful lot more music, whether we like it or not. The unaccompanied voice is a more difficult thing to "sell" to an audience raised on the rhythms and harmonies of the modern popular music that comes crowding in on us everywhere we go. If I stand up in a schoolroom of 8-year-olds and launch into a song, the reaction is a mixture of shock and nervous tittering - they've never experienced an adult doing something like that before, and they don't know how to respond. Anyhow, I'd say that words and melody are considerably more important than harmony, but bear in mind that both have been historically fluid. You could argue that the essence of the song tradition lies not in the words or tunes but in the stories that the old ballads tell (the same story can be told through very different lyrics) or you could just as well argue that the important thing is the style of singing, rather than the songs themselves. Or that the process of transmission and change are the things that count, over and above content. Your research will doubtless find people prepared to argue these and other standpoints to the very death.

"some opinions on the importance of preserving folk traditions would be great."

Well, I think it's important. The English, with our history of imperialism and suppression of other races, are in a rather different category historically from the Irish, the Scots, the Cajuns, the Basques, the Quebecois and all sorts of other peoples who have clung to their traditions (which can mean cuisine, clothing, language, jokes, and all kinds of stuff as well as folksongs) as a means of expressing their identity. Nonetheless I think we Anglos need to keep a sense of identity as well. As a single example: traddy-baiters always accuse us of singing songs about ploughboys with whose lives we have absolutely no affinity, but many of those old rural songs reflect a specific landscape which despite some degradation is still around us. Trying to define an English identity that isn't about empire or bulldogs or St. George or sending the foreigners home is a tricky business, but I believe that our traditions can help us realise in some small way who we actually are. And that's no bad thing in a world spinning ever faster.

Now please leave me alone so I can get back to my tax return.