Tom, you posted:

"System a - no record players, no radios, not many books - what do you call them?

System b - with record players, radios, and lots of books - what do you call them?

That's the two types of singers/ songs and processes we need to separate. (Reasons explained above)"

The purpose of my earlier post was to ask why we need to differentiate between these two "systems". We know that singers like Sheila Stewart, who sang family songs, also picked up things from the radio and saw no reason to put them in different categories - though those who 'collected her' did.

If the 'folk process' is taking a song from a source and doing your own thing with it - as whole populations do with songs, words, clothes, food, etc. - then this term applies regardless of the source. Of course people did it differently in the past - they didn't have the technology to do otherwise. We do, so we use it.

So-called 'source singers' (and there's another whole debate about that term!) also had their sources. I wonder if they argued over terms and categories from the past? Or did they just learn the songs because they liked them? If someone had offered them a CD from the future to learn songs from, would they have refused it on the grounds that this wasn't 'traditional' or 'folk' enough?