"FOLK MUSIC: Music deriving from, and expressive of, a particular national, ethnic or regional culture" (Philip's Essential Encyclopedia). (And I have checked others and found similar.)"

So—why should this dictate what I, or anyone else, should be allowed to sing? Or how we should be allowed to sing it?

If the idea that one should be allowed to sing only songs from one's own national, ethnic, or regional culture were some sort of "Universal Law," as you apparently wish it to be, I think folk music would have shriveled and died centuries ago. Many of the finest singers of folk songs extant now were urban-born and raised on a diet of whatever music (popular, classical, etc.) they happened to have been exposed to as they grew up. Most of them, like me, heard their first folk songs on the radio or on records (or, quite possibly live, from some singer who learned his or her songs from records and/or song books), and became interested in the songs per se.

The first folk songs I heard came from sources like this, and the songs themselves came from all over the Anglo-American folk song world:   from the rural south of the United States, from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (where, I regret, I have never been), from logging camps in upstate New York and the Pacific Northwest (I've never worked as a logger), fishing songs, whaling songs and other sea songs from all over the world's oceans (ship's crews were often muli-national, multi-cultural, although most of my maritime travel has been on car-carrying ferry boats between Seattle and Bainbridge Island or Bremerton, or sport fishing with my father), railroad songs (I've ridden on trains, but I've never been at the throttle during a train wreck, nor have I lined track on a chain gang), prison songs (being fairly law-abiding, I've never been to prison), and I even sing a few songs in French, though I've never been to France. Well, you get the point.

If I were allowed to sing only songs from my national, ethnic, and cultural background, I would have damned little in the way of folk songs to sing. And with the exception of singers such as Jean Ritchie, who grew up in Viper County, Kentucky and learned her songs from her family, the same holds for the vast majority of performers of folk songs and ballads, both those who are very well known through their concerts and recordings and those who sing only in folk clubs, with a few friends, or in the privacy of their own homes.

And that includes you, David!

Think about it.

Don Firth

P. S. Someone (Alan Lomax, I think--??) once characterized a folk song printed in a book or, for that matter, recorded or any single performance, as like a photograph of a bird in flight. You are seeing the bird for only one instant in its lifetime. It existed before this and it continues to exist afterward.

And folk songs are like birds in another way as well:   they, like the vagrant breezes that I mentioned above, are no respecters of political borders or cultural restrictions. They go anywhere they wish.

Why would anyone want them to be locked in cages?