'Traditional' carries a whole lot of cultural and historical baggage that goes way beyond its entertainment function; this is what has been researched and documented extensively, and whatever happens on the club scene, it is this that will survive, both in archive form and documentation.

Jim - you must be a thought reader! I've been privately mulling over just this very point a number of times recently. (As you can see, I've nothing better to do in retirement). It's very obvious from your own detailed and personal postings here in the past that, in addition to the "cultural and historical" significance of traditional music, it has a very personal and particular significance for you - dare I say almost a liberating one? As you've described it, hearing this stuff for the first time gave a sense of direction and meaning to your life - and correct me if I'm wrong.

Now, not being a huge fan of such cultural and historical significance in song (I should stress that I also love the stuff of tradition but prefer to get my dosage of it from reading) I wonder if there's a danger of the music itself being lost. Might the scholarship and research and authenticity questions make us lose sight of the musical merit or otherwise of the melodies - perhaps forget the part they play in sheer entertainment? You might think it a trivial quibble, but one of the reasons I prefer to play, rather than sing, traditional and not-quite-traditional tunes is that, on the whole, they don't come with any baggage other than their melodies.

I'm not a weaver, nor a blacksmith, nor a shoemaker nor a miner - all those people formed part of my own ancestry in England, Ireland and Scotland but are long gone - and I can't feel it in me to sing songs as though I were one of those people. But playing tunes from all their cultures has a freedom for me that the performance of their songs doesn't. And, as I've said many times before, there's less worry about more recent traditional-style jigs, reels and hornpipes sliding into the canon than there is with songs. This is precisely because tunes aren't loaded with a cultural and historical baggage. You can play them and dance to them without a care in the world.

How many of us now can honestly sing a traditional song as though we were part of the world that it came from? Very few, is my guess. So those that do are almost characters in a sort of historical re-enactment society. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, but I have to confess that, for me, the melody is more important than the content.