Jim, I generally find myself either agreeing with, or at least accepting, your contributions to these discussions, but I am having a little difficulty just now.

You have often referred to songs being written in your part of Ireland, and I assumed you meant right up to the present day. And yet you also refer to the folk process being dead. Do you mean that new songs are being made but they are not becoming folk songs? If so, what is preventing them? Are the original versions instantly frozen, by recording or print? Are other people learning them but not changing them at all?

"Our folk songs recorded and reflected the aspirations of entire communities, not tiny groups of specialists who self-consciously met once every whenever to listen to each other sing."

Weren't Henry Burstow and Walter Pardon (for example) likewise specialists, taking an interest in songs from earlier times, an interest that was shared by only a very few of their contemporaries?

"They arose from the experiences of those communities, served them for a time and disappeared when they had served their purpose, other than those few that were caught like butterflies by collectors and archived or published."

What about the songs from the 17th and 18th centuries (whether originally made by peasants or professionals) being remembered and sung by Henry Burstow in the 19th century and Walter Pardon in the 20th?

The early collectors quite deliberately picked and chose what they regarded as authentic "folk" songs and turned their noses up at other songs. But their criteria were essentially subjective and aesthetic.

There have always been people making new songs, and some of those songs have been learnt and sung by other people, sometimes in a process as recognised by the 1954 definition, sometimes by much more deliberate re-writing.

The environment has changed over the centuries. Cheap print certainly made a huge difference to the dissemination of songs, whether or not it was the original source of many of them. Then collectors started issuing song books. Now we have recordings. All these media facilitate the movement of songs to new mouths, and to some extent inhibit variation. But they have not stopped it.

And some segments of "the folk" have embraced new songs to the extent of claiming them for their own. Ask Dave Webber about Padstonians complaining about his singing "their" song which in fact he had written.

Enough rambling for now!