It makes a lot of sense, Jed. They're not necessarily good because they're old. As someone once observed, they're old (and still being sung) because they're good. I recall a well-intentioned bumper sticker created by an enthusiast in Hartford. It read: "Sing a Traditional Song." Pete Seeger saw it and suggested it might be better to say: "Sing a GOOD Song."

Jerry, as you know, I think many of your original songs can happily stand next to the good traditional ones from which you draw your inspiration, but a song doesn't become "traditional" until it has gone through the process of oral or aural transmission. After all, what does the term mean? A new song may well be very "folk-like," if you will, but until it has been polished by passing through the oral/aural process, it can hardly be referred to as "traditional."

Woody Guthrie is a real challenge to the academic who wishes to categorize everything and everybody. I worked in the wheat fields of Kansas in the mid-1940s with a number of migrant farm workers. They sang songs from popular C&W performers, older traditional songs, and whatever else happened to appeal to them. If they'd ever heard one of Guthrie's songs, they probably would have liked it and learned it, but Woody may have been singing on a merchant vessel at that time, or on the radio on Los Angeles. My point is that the harvest hands didn't give a damn for categories. Only those who make a disciplined study of popular culture find a need for such things. Guthrie was an innovator and a compulsive songmaker. He borrowed melodies from the Carter Family and other, perhaps less well-known, musicians, and fashioned new words to address issues that concerned him or simply to entertain. In the early 1960s I recorded an old gentleman in East Tennessee who sang many old ballads and songs, but also made up original songs about local events. These were usually set to traditional melodies. He sang a dandy, home-made, satirical song about conditions in a lumber camp where he had worked some sixty years before I met him. The tune was that often known as "Hard Times in Durant Jail," or "Hard Times in Colman's Mines." He assured me that the tune was his own and that he didn't know any other song using it. Clearly, his borrowing of the tune was unconscious. Woody's borrowings may have been more deliberate. Like others whose roots were nourished in traditional surroundings, he felt free to use a tune for a new statement, as when "John Hardy" was transformed into "Tom Joad." To my way of thinking, that demonstrates Woody's genuine folk background. He was doing, consciously or otherwise, just what old Abe Trivett did when he poked fun at the lousy food and fierce bedbugs in Rupert's Lumber Camps. Later, of course, when money becomes a factor in the equation, "ownership" of a tune can become a matter of some importance. Among the non-professional folk musicians, no one thought about that sort of thing. Oh, one singer might say, "Yeah, I know that one, but that's Charlie's song," speaking of another local musician. This happened in the Miramichi Festival in New Brunswick. James Brown would never sing his own fine version of "Hind Horn" at the festival because that particular ballad was considered to be another singer's special performance piece but it was not a question of "ownership" in the sense of holding a commercial copyright to the material.

Speaking of categories: Sara Cleveland, the remarkable traditional singer from the upper Hudson Valley, would sing a rare classic ballad learned from her mother, then a soaringly beautiful traditional lyric, also part of her family's song tradition, and then ask if I'd like to hear "Only a Violet" or "Nettie's Visit to Grandma." To Sara, they were all just songs she loved. The classifications can be handy tools for the study of the material, but they are important only to the student, not to the informant.

So, friends, our tempest swirls vigorously in our teapot. Sing 'em if you love 'em, new or old. In time, the new ones may become traditional, helped on in the process by your contribution to their longevity. They'll change along the way; rough edges will be smoothed out, awkward phrases may be revised for the better or omitted altogether, new verses may appear, created by unknown contributors, and the result may be that several versions will survive, subtly different or dramatically so. That's what happens in the tradition. But remember: the song's the thing! The rest is purely academic.

Sandy