Meanwhile, awaiting the boiler man before I can put the heating on...

"The Post-Revival" is a figment of the imagination of people who seem to believe themselves part of a living tradition. As Smedley suggested, it appears to be a term of your own imaginings.

You're correct on one point there, Jim - I only came up with the term on Sunday (whilst wandering the well-pruned winter rose garden in Blackpool's Stanley Park) but I think the Post-Revival is a real enough as a cultural phenomenon with respect of Folk Music. Amongst other things, it encapsulates the experience of those younger folkies (such as myself, born as recently as 1961..) who came to The Tradition via certain aspects of The Revival and found therein something of considerable significance - far greater, in fact, than anything The Revival had to offer - real music in fact. My cultural back-ground is primarily in areas of experimental rock, jazz, free improvisation & early classical, disciplines which lead, invariably, to an appreciation of Ethnomusicology and Folk Music proper. This, in turn, leads to a wider understanding of musical possibility and cultural action which exists at odds to the innate conservatism of The Revival - which I most certainly do not dismiss out of hand, only in terms of a personal polemic that clarifies my particular stance.

The communities that created our traditional songs and music have long moved on and are now passive recipients of their culture.

No individual is a passive recipient of culture, Jim; this is as patronising as it is absurd. Granted you have your personal agendas & experiences on such matters, but only as an outsider looking in on such communities, valuing things according to your subjective desires without appreciation the wider anthropological issues. In this respect, I'm afraid to say, you sound like rather like WAV. You wanted the songs, they wanted the TV. In the end, which is more important - the people or the residual aspects of a former cultural era?

What now passes for folk is a part of a revival of the material that they left us - if we don't get our heads around that fact we will have sqandered even that.

I disagree. It's moved on beyond the revival - maybe it did so many years ago - and found an entirely different level of cultural currency with many younger people, such as myself, see above, for whom The Revival has consequently become, by and large, anametha because of it being founded on a highly conservative aesthetical orthodoxy which is something we don't find in The Tradition. There are many reasons for this, but central to what I'm now calling the Post-Revival is a moving away from the revival conservative orthodoxy and seeking out something of the fire that still blazes in both the music, and the communities who still cherish it.      

Stop whingeing and live with it.

Like you do, you mean? God knows what New Year's Resolution you've made here, Jim but I'm really beginning to worry...

Because you appear to neither like nor understand folk music proper - as amply demonstrated by your constant self-promotion.

On the contrary, it's because I love Folk Music Proper that the increasingly bland MOR affectations of revival depress me so much, a circumstance which necessitates & inspires the Post-Revival. I've been feeling the same way for years - even back in 1983 when I was renting a house off a taxidermist and I hung a label around the neck of one of her stuffed cormorants declaring it a monument to the Folk Revival. As for self-promotion; most people who know me complain I don't do enough, but the stuff I link to around here is not by way of self-promotion as such, more by way of giving example & joining in a virtual singaround wherein all things are equal with respect of what we do & why we do it. I love watching Dick's stuff, hearing Crow Sister, Ralphie, and Virginia Tam etc. and wish more people would do the same. If I sing in a singaround, which I do quite a lot, I do so not to promote myself, but because I feel the essential experience of Tradition Song is communally informal, yet once evoked, the spirit remains potent enough to effect some serious communion, and not just in the choruses either.

The essence of the Post-Revival is the Inclusivity & Celebration of of Individuality & Idiosyncrasy; I am but one individual, part of the Human Community as indeed we all are. Let's start seeing the trees here; for all too long all we've been seeing is the fecking wood.

*

SOP's argument, if I understand it, is that because material was "plundered" from the traditional sources (itself debatable) then its being plundered in turn by music sharers is justifiable. I don't believe that's a valid argument.

That's more what Jim's saying. What I'm saying is that plundering & sampling is the essence of all Folk Music. In the Tradition we call The Folk Process; in the Revival we call it Collecting. The difference being is that The Folk Process is a living breathing - er - process, whilst collecting is just taxidermy. Get this though: Both were done with The Very best of Intentions out of a deep Love of The Music. Please mark that, Howard - because file sharing is done with very best of intentions too. Music will out; it lives and breathes beyond any commodity status we might like to subject it to. No one can claim exclusive rights to their life's work simply because everything we do came from somewhere else in the first place.

Anyway, the boiler man has gone, now I can put the heating on.