Some traditions, including Newfoundland (where Ms. Karpeles collected songs) accept recently-composed songs as part of the traditional corpus. ("If it sounds traditional, it is traditional," might be the criterion.) Other traditions don't (including, it seems, the tradition within which Karpeles thought she was working). It becomes a question for the community within which the new song is born. This is as true of today's folk music scene as it was of early 20th-Century Newfoundland.