How can any songs become "traditional" if they have to reflect a local community and have been learned and sung for pleasure instead of for (extremely limited) commercial gain? asks Jerry.

That sounds a lot like how it is today for the sort of loose intentional community of people who come together to make music at sessions and clubs and festivals. The commercial gain for most of us is hardly more than the price of a few pints of beer and not always that. The most important thing about a possible gig is a chance to play. And will it be fun or not?

And most of the songs we sing and the tunes we play are ones we learned face to face, even if where when you chase down the people you learned them from it won't be that long before you find someone who learned it from a record. But then, how is that so very different from them having learned it from a broadside they bought at the fair?

I think that the people who see the music and the songs as important to them have always probably been an odd bunch, a sort of community within the wider community. Maybe the distinctions and the distance is a bit more pronounced; and the extent to which we are local has changed, but not as much as some people assume. Most people in this part of the world still seem to live within a few miles of where they grew up.

WE may not feel entitled to call ourselves "traditional", but we live and make music within a continuing living tradition that is going to change, but is not going to die.