D'Cats--

This thread has been more enlightening to me on this topic than the previous ones...

Nevertheless--here's my dilemma. The tradition I write from is largely Child ballads, Playford tunes, and the Lomax collection. Tim's influence is primarily bluegrass and its antecedents. We perform songs from these genres (in varying porportions) when we play out. The songs we write have a lot to do with our experiences of the world, but in the sense that our experience is what we know--we try to keep the topics humanly timeless (as opposed to topical, though I think topical has a place in the folk tradition), the melodies singable, the chord progressions logically playable, and the lyrics memorable. Sometimes we write songs we like...mostly we write a lot of songs.

We'd both like to make a living writing and performing songs. However, our creative goal is to have people singing our songs around the equivalent of song circles in the year 2099. If we're really good, we'll write the equivalent of a Child ballad or a Playford tune, and people will be performing it in 2350. Does this make us folkies? or singers/songwriters? Does it matter???

V