Sorry, Musket, but I can't agree. Nor would field collectors like the Lomax family, Frank and Ann Warner, Cecil Sharp, or scholars and collators such as Francis James Child. They had some specific guidelines for what they were looking for, and songs written yesterday, no matter what style, were not it.

Interesting to note that in the spoof movie, "A Mighty Wind," about a get-together of popular folk groups for a television show, they had "The Folksmen" (an obvious take-off on the Kingston Trio), "The New Main Street Singers" (The New Christy Minstrels), a bickering couple (Ian and Sylvia), and there was a whole lot of singing in the movie. But the interesting thing was that the main joke in the movie was that there was not one single genuine traditional folk song in the entire movie! All the songs in the movie were written for the movie and succeeded in sounding like "Sixties Folk."   And damned few "folkies" who jumped on the bandwagon in the Sixties even noticed!!

The movie was done by Christopher Guest, who specializes in "mockumentaries" and was a send-up of the so-called "folk revival." And in the songs in the movie there are a lot of pretty hilarious double meanings. Damned few Sixties folkies got those either.

The sad fact is that there are a lot of self-styled "folk singers" who don't know diddly-squat about traditional folk music—and don't seem to care.

I am not using the "1954 definition." I hadn't heard of it until recently, here on Mudcat. My first interest in folk music came when I was a teenager, listening to Burl Ives' radio program, "The Wayfaring Stranger" in the 1940s, on which he talked about historical events such as the building of the Erie Canal and sang songs associated with those events. Later on, I took a course in the English Literature department at the University of Washington entitled "The English and Scottish Popular Ballad." I have a substantial collection of books by people like the Lomaxes, Carl Sandberg, Evelyn Kendrick Welles, McEward Leach, and others, containing exhaustive discussions of what constitutes a traditional folk song or ballad. Not to mention Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars. I've also studied a batch of stuff about the British Isles and Scandinavian minstrels (bards, scops, and skalds), the French troubadours, and the German minnesingers. All of this stuff goes back at least a thousand years, and most probably much further.

And at least one of the songs I sing is at least 400 years old, passed down in the folk tradition until collected by Thomas Ravenscroft in the 1600s. Another goes back at least 500 years.

You can't simply write a folk song. Even if it sounds like a folk song, it is not a folk song until it has been around awhile and sung by a lot of people. One person is not a "tradition."

Take a look at this:   CLICKY

Don Firth

P. S. Incidentally, this does not stop me from singing any song that I take a fancy to. I just don't try to pass it off as a folk song if it isn't.