Sedayne aka Suibhne Astray

The quote comes a polemical blog on the same page, TheSnail. Like most polemical writing this sets out a series of ideals rather than a practical code for living, other than to delight in their myriad wonders of course, which is what any revival singer of traditional material is doing anyway - myself included - not by way preserving the tradition, or being part of the folk process, but by simply doing what they want to do. After all, who's going to stop them?

Of the traditional material on that site you'll hear The Collier's Rant sung in a traditional manner with fiddle; two sets of Gently Me Johnny, one trad.,the other Bowderised by C#; Child #19 : King Orfeo sung to the traditional melody using a Tibetan singing Bowl as a drone; Seeds of Love sung traditionally with feral hurdy-gurdy in an otherwise freely-improvised context; and Child #49: The Rolling of the Stones sung with freely improvising viola, pocket cornet & frame drum accompaniment. Maybe this gets back to an earlier post of Jim's (which I've just read) but in all of these examples the inspiration comes from the Traditional Source rather than a Revival reading of same. In my adolescence I was faced with a choice of two roads - one way said FOLK MUSIC, the other said EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC. After a momentary deliberation I decided to go off into the uncharted wilderness between the two, which certainly accounts for the songs on my myspace page, which is just revival folk, just my non-traditional accompaniments might not be what you're used to. Whatever the case, I would never purposefully change a traditional song to suit my own needs. The closest I come to this is with those ballads that don't have traditional tunes - The Wee Wee Man and The Twa Corbies - or those I've first come across without tunes, such as The Wife of Usher's Well, for which I've composed my own in the traditional idiom, but not in the tradition.

As I said in my second post to this thread: Seriously, do what you want, but to do so in the name of The Tradition or the Folk Process is, to borrow one of Richard's words, asinine.