Taking the question at face value, it's a no-brainer. As the late and great Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa once said: "A tradition is preserved one generation at a time". The future of folk music clearly lies with the succeeding generations, if only because Jim Moray and his age group will still (I hope) be playing and singing traditional songs and music when I, and Dick Miles, and Jim Carroll, are pushing up daisies. Then one day let's hope the generation beyond Jim Moray's will pick up the old material and do something different with it again.

It would be foolish to expect every successive generation to take the same approach to traditional material; each of us has a musical personality that's a product of the music that we've soaked up, whether that be MacColl, Carthy, 70s rock, minimalism or rap. The interesting thing will be to see what happens with the generation that did not grow up experiencing Fred Jordan or Lizzie Higgins or Walter Pardon at first hand. Will they be studying the archive recordings for style (as Sam Lee, Emily Portman and Lauren McCormick, for instance, have done)? Jon Boden and Fay Hield have booked Will Noble and John Cocking twice for their folk club, so they clearly think that the old style of performance is worth hearing and cherishing.

One of things I always liked about folk music is that each generation has always been prepared to learn from the previous one, and long may that continue, even as new experimental approaches are tested. As for 'purists', well, if you're going to apply that label to anyone who likes to simply stand up and sing an old song without accompaniment, then you're dismissing many of the greatest singers of our age according to a value judgement none of them would recognise. I suspect that way of singing a song will still hold its appeal however much technology gets showered over us.