I'll admit to skimming this thread, so please accept my apologies if I cover ground that has already been covered.

Short answer. No.

Long answer. Yes. And long live traditional music.

Folklore is at heart a social product - that is what makes what we do different from pop or classical music. While we might perform it on a stage from time to time, it really belongs at the sing-arounds, in the pubs, and in the home. And on the picket lines. (Has anyone else noticed that folks suddenly want to hear union songs? Yay!)

You can make a case that shape note songs aren't traditional, because they're written down in choral arrangements - but it's hard to make a case that shape note _singing_ isn't traditional.

But the tradition does change. I hope that the old ballads that I love will never go away, and that the musical styles I love will never go away, but I have to admit that the tradition can and will change, if it is to survive.

Someone recently commented to me that the autoharp isn't really a folk traditional instrument because it has only been around for 110 years. But in that time, it worked its way into oral tradition so it is a folk instrument. Guitars are a recent innovation in much Anglo-American folk music, and I'm not complaining. How old is Travis picking? Does that make it any less traditional?

There is a wonderful poem by Carl Sandburg about language that encapsulates how I feel about tradition:

    LANGUAGES

    There are no handles upon a language
    Whereby men take hold of it
    And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
    It is a river, this language,
    Once in a thousand years
    Breaking a new course
    Changing its way to the ocean.
    It is mountain effluvia
    Moving to valleys
    And from nation to nation
    Crossing borders and mixing.
    Languages die like rivers.
    Words wrapped round your tongue today
    And broken to shape of thought
    Between your teeth and lips speaking
    Now and today
    Shall be faded hieroglyphics
    Ten thousand years from now.
    Sing--and singing--remember
    Your song dies and changes
    And is not here to-morrow
    Any more than the wind
    Blowing ten thousand years ago.

I say these things not to get into a debate about what constitutes folk music or traditional music (please no!) but rather to provide a modicum of encouragement. As long as parents sing to their babies, traditional music lives. As long as pimply college kids get out their guitars, whether it's for the joy of singing or for, shall we say, romantic purposes, traditional music lives.

And if we keep singing the songs that we love, be they recent or a thousand years old, they might just stay in or become part of the tradition. It merely requires that we sing with each other and to each other rather than at each other, because that's what folk music is.

And that's why I love it.

Dan

PS: I don't plan on dying anytime soon!