Some random observations...

The body of song material we call 'traditional' has an unknown authorship. I personally believe that all songs sprang from individual writers/authors/creators - call them what you will - and that, before the advent of recording media, the song collectors and a more general ability to read and write, the songs were 'recorded' in peoples' memories. And, of course, they evolved and changed through that process, in many cases over a long period of time. That evolving process has ceased, and it ceased, ironically, when the collectors and the note-takers and the men and women with notebooks and (later) tape-recorders started their work. I wouldn't care to put a date on that cessation, not knowing enough of the history, but I know, for example, that Bob Copper was out and about with a reel-to-reel tape recorder in Hampshire in the '50s.

In one sense, therefore, the body of work of that particular orally-transmitted nature is fixed for ever and finite, in this country at any rate. Is it to remain fixed and finite? Will singers of the future - of the next 50, 100, 150, 200 years - who want to sing 'traditional' songs be limited to, perhaps, an ever-receding body of work? If so, that might be a sad and proscriptive future for some fine music. If not - then how is that body of work to be added to? Can we not add to it fine songs in the genre whose origins - authors - we happen to know? I quote (and I've quoted it before) Roger Bryant's great song "Cornish Lads", which touches on age-old themes of locality, loss of work, working-class attitudes and problems, sung to a great tune and with beautiful words which touch people's hearts and have meaning for them. A traditional song in all but the fact that we know the author. And - yes - it won't change because it's been written down, recorded and set in stone. Just like all those songs from a previous era which have also now been recorded, written down, collected and set in stone.