No, John, I DON'T want the tradition to be a museum piece. Nor is it.

But when someone steps up to the mic and says "This is a folk song I just wrote last week," he's talking nonsense. He's trying to claim a level of prestige for his song that it has not earned.

As someone up-thread pointed out, you can't write a folk song any more than you can write a hit song. Whether it becomes a "hit"--or a folk song--depends on what happens to it then.

I have a repertoire of a couple hundred songs. The vast majority of them are traditional folk songs. That does not prevent me from singing songs which are NOT traditional folk songs, but I don't try to claim that they are.

What's so hard to understand about that?

Don Firth