Perhaps if folk music evolves and changes over time depending on the folk who listen to it then so does it's definition.

Perhaps in the age of internet, radio, tv, cassette, mp3, cd, lp, MD, dvd, isdn, cable, sattelite etc etc etc, the reality of the context in which folk music exists is so significantly different to what it was in the 1950's that rapid evolution has occurred/is occurring/will occur/ ... needs to occur ...

Maybe bob dylan, his contemporaries and those who have emerged since, appeared on the scene too late to ever be examined fairly in the light of the 1954 declaration.

When everyone all over the world already knows his version of "blowin in the wind" off by heart and has resulting expectations of it, they are more often than not going to revert to it.

It's more convenient on the record and more reliably accurate and satisfying too.

But more relevantly, it hasn't needed to be passed on by word of mouth. Technology has rendered that a comparatively redundant means of communication. Folk everywhere have music technology at their fingertips nowadays, even if just a transistor radio or a simple cassette recorder.

If bob dylans music hadn't been recorded and marketed so successfully on such a grand scale, wouldn't the line "how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man" have been sung by increasing numbers of performers, all eager to spread the songs message at a time when those words, coming from a white man, meant so much to those who had lost faith in white men and who were tired of being called "BOY"

Would Sam Cooke have sung it, redefining it in his own inimitable style? He was one of many who were deeply moved and inspired by it. In his case, so much so that he wrote "a change is gonna come".

So the message in that case was added to in a different way because the song was already out there and didn't need to be spread in the same way as other folk songs have been.


Just some thoughts :-)