So-- writing songs down, recording them, and otherwise making sure there is some way they are remembered, passed on, handed down, etc- I think we all agree that is vital. The danger lies in making music--a living tradition--into a museum piece, for the sake of somebody's arbitrary notion of authenticity, and trying to play down the importance of performance. For me, the power and the meaning in music comes through either playing it or listening to it played or sung-- with all the human emotion, experience, etc that is involved there. The old collectors treated their sources-- performers, people like us--as simply vessels in which the music somehow was carried. They saw the music to be some remnant of an idealised rural past that was rapidly dying out at and needed to be preserved at all costs. They thought the music had to be maintained as part of the body of national folk culture; they were not interested in the ways in which it was performed or the importance of that performance (and thus their efforts to correct its grammer, perform it on pianos in posh drawing rooms, etc). So while we can't be too hard on the collectors-- indeed there are many songs we wouldn't have record of today without their efforts-- we don't have to repeat their mistakes.

--Anyway-- that's what I think...