I play a lot of traditional music, despite being one of them danged Singer/songwriters. Even if I played all traditional music, I wouldn't consider myself a traditional musician. Not even sure what people mean by that... probably people who didn't grow up in the tradition who play traditional music. It don't really matter much to me. Just like Jimmy asked why people don't play 60's folk music. I don't think there is any "60's folk music." I think he meant, folk music that became popular in the 60's. Are we playing 2,000 Aught folk music right now? The term traditional music means something to me, but not traditional musicians, unless we're looking at the last of old-timers(rapidly approaching being one myself.) But heck, even Uncle Dave Macon and Charlie Poole and Doc Watson all played popular songs they heard growing up. And they learned stuff from records, too.

I found the traditional musicians thread like reading about Martian musicians. Not being an instrumentalist or playing in a string band, the thoughts in that thread would never occur to me. If I'm not playing in concert pitch, it's because I rarely play with another musician, so if in repeated tuning, I wander up a half step, so what? Even when I played regularly with another musician, we just tuned to each other, and would have thought the idea of an electronic tuner, or even a pitch pipe was bizarre. Mostly, I just play the stuff. Let others worry about how to categorize things. :-)

Jerry