I was aware of the Digital Tradition motherload of lyrics back when it was hosted/maintained at Xerox/PARC in Palo Alto, and stumbled upon Mudcat only after Xerox gave up custody of the DT and Mudcat had successfully applied for adoption.

At least, that's how I think I remember things. But that implies that Mudcat existed for a while before incorporating the DT. So, when I read that "Susan of DT" was one of the very first Mudcat members, I was briefly confused. She must have used another name at first, I suppose. (When a member changes his/her name, the name-change takes effect "globally," throughout all archived history; that is, the new name appears on all the person's old postings.)

Finding Mudcat at the time when the DT had just recently been incorporated probably means that I witnessed the beginning of the end of Mudcat's era as a predominantly American, blues-oriented phenomenon. The presence of all those tradtional lyrics attracted folk-oriented web-searchers from all around the English-speaking world, forever changing (broadening) the demographics here.

I myself am American and primarily interested in music related to the blues, so in a sense I miss the "good old days" and indeed regret having completely missed the even-older and presumably even-better days. But that's OK. I like it well enough now, and I get a certain kind of bemused enjoyment from monitoring a British folk-music scene that is far outside my personal experience and therefore sometimes fascinating and often amusing to me.

I'm not sure how far back my history at Mudcat goes. I was a very occasional lurker at first, later a very occasional guest-poster, and finally a member, I can look up my oldest post as PoppaGator easily enough, and also perhaps an earlier GUEST post or two as my real self. I'll submit this message now before I lose it, then look up those dates...