The trouble with the idea of a traditional performer is not the performer him/herself. It's the promoters, the academics, the self-styled authorities who set this performer up as a kind of standard to be replicated. Anything other is not considered "authentic" which is nonsense. Even the notion of a "traditional" performer is an academic construct and may have nothing to do with the value of that said performer.

The reason that the folk revival in the US was aborted was because of the idea that a song had to be frozen as done by a personality for popular consumption. You couldn't take a Dylan song for example and change it around without some folkie jumping down your neck or getting sued by Dylan himself. In short, the creative life of a musician or composer was cut down. The life blood of whatever folk music is happens to be change.

Now when you talk about a folk revival, it has no meaning today. In its time, it was an adjunct of popular music and another branch of show business as exemplified by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, P P and M or the Trio. Even Alan Lomax in his entrepreneurial role was a showman of sorts.   Bascom Lamar Lunsford's Asheville Folk Festival was a commercial venue, a kind of show business that attracted tourism. Ewan McColl, Peter Kennedy, A.L. Lloyd are show business people and even the Comhaltas Ceoltori Eireann can be considered as a branch of show business in which audiences pay to see performers.

A folk revival is an oxymoron. Folk music goes on in different forms regardless of what many half-baked academic authorities have to say about it. All you have to do is open your ears. It has nothing to do with whether a performer is deemed to be traditional by self-styled authorities or not.

My point is simple. Any culture-based musical expression contains enough musical information outside of that culture to render it as much non-traditional as it is traditional. So what does that leave us? Many talented wonderful singers who have something to offer by singing songs that have history, knowledge and style and are great whether or not they are called "traditional". The label is a red herring. There is no pure race. There is no pure music.

Frank Hamilton