all the historical knowledge in the world isn't going to change or create a melody or lyric and doesn't have much to do with how the music actually gets transmitted and played today.

The Tradition inspires new creations, new artists, new approaches, even new traditions which echo what Jim wrote in the article (quoted a few posts back by johncharles): folk/traditional performers have to change. That's just the way it is really, everyone has something new to bring to it, and so it goes on, ad infinitum. The Finite aspect is the Old Songs, and the cultural & historical conditions in which they arose. That's finished. Just as ploughing with horses is finished; just as steam railways are finished. They exist as revivals and recreations; things you see in a Living Museum like Beamish, but save for the passions of a few enthusiasts diligenty beavering away then they'd be gone. Is the Folk Scene a living museum? I don't think so - although it could easily be, and I dare say to many that's exactly what it is. I used to love museums - I still love the Pit-Rivers Museum and the random threadbare taxidermy & ethnographic clutter of the old Handcock in Newcastle before they ruined it. I see the Folk Scene as being like that - random clutter endangered by over-eager curators seeking to somehow clean it up and bring it up to date, or put to heavy a stamp on the public displays whilst the really interesting stuff is kept locked away in the vaults.

Looking forward muchly to seeing the Grayson Perry exhibit at the British Museum when we're down there in December...

By learning a song from a field-recording of a traditional singer that you're not keeping that tradition alive, rather you're doing something quite different. I respect the validity of that difference, and respect its outcomes, but as an artist it behoves me to stress that I'm not a collector or an archivist; neither am I an academic, but as an educated human being with a passion for Ethnomusicology and Folkloric Disciplines then I will continue to point out the glaring disparities between subject / object when it comes to a basic consideration of the various problems and agendas involved in one culture collecting the cultural residue of another, much less subjecting it to any sort of absolute definition or taxonomy. Problem is here on Mudcat it's difficult to have those sort of discussions without incurring the wrath of a couple of culprits whose orthodoxy and fundamentalism has inspired in me the notion of Folk as a Religion, rather than as a culture in its own right...