The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #99843   Message #1996461
Posted By: Scrump
14-Mar-07 - 11:35 AM
Thread Name: What IS Folk Music?
Subject: RE: What IS Folk Music?
Richard - thanks for posting those various extracts.

GUEST,Guest Baz - your comments are interesting too. I agree with you about modern recording and mass distribution of recorded music making it very unlikely that in future, the author/composer of songs written today will be of unknown authorship (while the world survives, anyway).

So Cecil Sharp's conclusion "A folk song is always anonymous" quoted by Richard above is unlikely ever to happen again, and if that were a requirement for a song or tune to be considered as 'folk music', then folk music would remain as a finite set of songs and tunes that could never be expanded.

Is that what we want? Maybe some people would say "yes" but I doubt very much whether all of us would.

[Btw, I'm quite enjoying this thread, and that's why I am opposed by any attempts to stop people discussing this subject. Yes, it has been discussed many times before, without any definite conclusion being reached as to an answer to the question in the thread subject. But I don't think it's fair to expect newcomers who were not part of the original discussions to just read the old threads and prohibit them from airing their views. Mudcat is an interactive forum, and people should be allowed to have their say if they wish, regardless as to whether it's been said before by other different people. Part of the fun is working things out for yourselves, by discussion.]