Can a song be called traditional if you know who wrote it?

Yes.

A Tradition is the idiom from which any given song is derived. No song ever defines its own idiom, so, therefore, all songs are traditional. All songs are the products of a tradition - be it Child Ballad #32 or Eat Yourself Fitter by The Fall or In this Trembling Shadow by John Dowland. All songs are the product of a creative process whereby the individual song-writer is drawing on the conventions of an ever evolving collective tradition. By making a song they are contributing directly to that tradition. All music is, therefore, Traditional Music - even F*lk Songs, not because they came about by some supernatural F*lk Process, but because they too were made as part of a traditional idiom by people who understood the craft of that idiom and could make, and re-make, songs accordingly. Amazingly (to Mudcat Pseudo-Traddies) this is still happening - people are still making songs as part of ever-evolving musical traditions. Now isn't that something?

The problem here is that Traddies & Folkies (relatively recent mutations of the human species) obsess over a limited canon of songs & their variants which are known as Traditional Folk Songs not because because of the way they came into being, but because of the way they were hungrily plundered from their natural habitats & made the subjects of an essentially bourgeois psuedo-science (laughing called The Folk Revival) which contaminated the actual traditions it claimed to be representing with its expectations and demands of what Folk Songs must be. Whilst in the Folk World circles ever decreased - and will continue to do so - in the real world, true musical traditions thrive.

The only Tradition that matters is the one that began when human beings first started making & singing songs. This tradition is alive and well 50,000 years down the line; this tradition is true Folk Music; and, it would seem, it is this tradition that is represented by the International Council of Traditional Music (formerly the International Folk Music Council) the aims which are to further the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of traditional music, including folk, popular, classical and urban music, and dance of all countries.

So, again, yes; a thousand times yes.

S O'P (presently astray)