are we talking creationism or evolution? I think the situation is reversed in the Fundamentalist Folk Realms, where the received wisdom is that there is something inherently inhuman about your genuine Folk Song on account of its evolution. You often read on Mudcat that such-and-such a song isn't a Folk Song because we know who wrote it, and that, no matter how entrenched that song may be in its particular community, if it hasn't satisfied the rather petty prescriptions of the 1954 Definition then isn't a Folk Song. So in the Fundamentalist Folk Realms, Folk Songs evolve via the quasi-mystical Folk Process - an essentially nebulous anonymous collective thing the substance of which is never fully explained - rather than via the creative genius of the individual working-class woman & men who made them, sang them, and altered them to suit their needs, or else mended the gaps left by the usual factors of wear & tear & imperfect recollection in an essentially oral context (fnarr, fnarr), or not as the case might be. Thus, my position is that belief in The Folk Process takes the same sort of blind faith as belief in Creationism, whereas the equivalent to Evolutionary Science is that Folk Songs are no different to any other sort of songs in that people write them according to a particular style (tradition), and sing them, change them, pass them on, and on, and on... So it is musical idioms & items evolve according to specific factors involving real human individuals as the creative masters of their craft. * Are the mutually-supportive 'Suibhne Astray' and 'Old Hobden' by any chance related? Old Hobden is, in fact, my spirit guide in matters Folk related; as a medium, I welcome his timeless radical wisdom which I'm honoured to channel in possession, although (on the downside) the ectoplasm is a bugger to get out the carpet. And does either have anything useful to say about Sunjay Brayne? Go for it, Sunjay. To be honest I don't 'get' that sort of music, but I'm happy that people are playing it and loving it which is all that matters, is it not? All music is Marmite, in which our boat either floats or sinks.
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