Rob - some very interesting comments from your own experience on how, in our modern times, popular songs - and even fragments of these songs - are remembered cross-culturally. Perhaps we're seeing the beginning of a different kind of "folk process" (I hate the phrase but can't think of a better) in which, from out of the multitude of popular songs composed and created in our time, certain ones get sifted out and come to prominence while the rest of them settle down to relative obscurity. I'm generalising, of course, but I'm sure you'll get my drift. The main difference between our time and that of the collectors at the turn of the 20th century is that recording and archiving techniques allow the provenance of all of this modern material to be known and documented. In this world, both the "classics" and the "dross" survive on an equal footing and can be brought out for inspection as and when required.

What would we have heard two or three or four hundred years ago? What has not survived? Perhaps, like today, a mixture of great songs and comparatively poor material. I've been listening avidly to music for the greater part of my 68 years, and been actively performing a wide range of music for over 45 of them. I often reflect that, when I first started listening to music hall songs, for example, this material was around 50-60 years old then. Now it's over 100 years old. Similarly, the 20s and 30s jazz I'm so fond of was in its 40s when I started playing it - but is now fast becoming a venerable centenarian. In both genres time has, like water running through a rock formation, eroded the soft stuff and left the peaks standing. It's a process analogous to that of traditional music, with the exception that, unlike traditional music, we have all the relevant birth information. What will be remembered and heard and played of our modern music in 100 time...?

As far as traditional music is concerned, I'm firmly of the belief that the songs we hear today started off as personal compositions by an individual. Some names survive, others don't. And I'm sorry to say that - not really being immersed in the folk song tradition, it matters not a jot to me whether Variant A is related to Variant B by way of a housewife in Banff. What does matter to me is how good the song/tune is to my ears.