BH: There are those like you that want the tradition to be a museum piece, and there are those like me and many others who want the tradition to be a living, breathing and developing thing, which after all is the true nature of a 'tradition'

No. What Don, Jim, Michael and I (among others) are saying is the same thing that the folk song collectors said*. The tradition that gave rise to traditional songs - widely adopted, sung by ordinary people at work or round the fire - is, to all intents and purposes, dead. Changes in society killed it off, just as they killed the trade of the wheelwright and the street porter.

There is a stock of traditional songs and it's not being added to, apart from odd discoveries in archives. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's an enormous stock - enough to keep anyone going for a lifetime - and a lot of them are brilliant songs. And they're good enough to take whatever you throw at them as a singer or arranger. (As Martin Carthy said, the worst thing you can do to these songs is not sing them.)

Or you can sing new songs - it's entirely up to you. But wanting the tradition to come back to life won't make it happen - and saying that you're adding to the tradition won't make it true.

*A bit of double-counting there, as Jim actually is a folk song collector