one is interpretation, the other is content.

Indeed, but both are determined by musical process and result in a similar level of diversification and musical difference, at least to those with ears to hear. I delight in how many different versions of particular song I might collect and just how different those versions are - like the 1971 BBC recording of Gong's Tropical Fish / Selene which takes it into very different territory indeed, very dark, but not quite as dark as that which appears on the Glastonbury Fayre side. Traditional Standards, like Jazz Standards, go off in all directions, but to what extent is content determined by interpretation in such a music?

I don't think you have to be a reactionary romantic in order to say people used to do this and they don't any more.

Indeed; my point all along is that it isn't happening any more to those sorts of songs and the particular tradition which gave us those songs is long dead. Musical process has always happened though, and will always happen as long people play music.

To quote myself from another forum (Sept 2007):

We lovers of traditional song are not so much the keepers of a tradition, rather the volunteer curators of a museum, entrusted with the preservation of a few precious, priceless and irreplaceable artefacts: hand-crafted tools we no longer know the names of (let alone what they were actually used for) ; hideous masks of woven cornstalks (which are invariably assumed to be pagan) ; and hoary cases of singular taxidermy wherein beasts long extinct are depicted in a natural habitat long since vanished.

Not only is such a museum a beacon for the naturally curious, it's a treasure in and of itself, an anachronism in age of instant (and invariable soulless) gratification, and as such under constant threat by those who want to see it revamped; cleaned up with computerised displays and interactive exhibits and brought into line with the rest of commodified cultural presently on offer.

But not only is this museum is our collective Pit-Rivers, it is a museum which, in itself, is just as much an artefact of a long-vanished era as the objects it contains. It is delicate, and crumbling, but those who truly love it wouldn't have it any other way - and quite rightly so.   

The traditional songs are already dead; they're as dead as the traditional singers that sang them and the traditional cultures to which they once belonged; they're as dead as fecking dodos the lot of them - but we must never forget...

Don't let the incoherent ramblings of glueman and SO'P make you think it isn't worth it.

And thus we find the Sycophantic Mollusc leaving his wretchedly non-constructive divisive slime-trail where e'er he slithers! And for what it's worth - I do give a toss. So slither off and pour your bitter bile elsewhere before someone stamps on your sorry arse.