There were a couple of acts at this year's aforementioned OCFF conference which wouldn't get booked at a folk festival if I had anything to do with the booking, not because they weren't good, but because they weren't folk, IMHO. I listened, and decided that in a folk festival atmosphere I would hope to find another act on another stage, and leave the bitching about it to others. I do find incessant singing-your-diary songwriting a little irritating, but some of those writers actually mature in time. This too was evident at the OCFF conference.

In my humble little local celtic roots (note: "roots") festival the definition of folk narrows somewhat compared to perhaps Mariposa, but only because the artistic direction has chosen that emphasis. Drop "celtic" or "roots" from the title and you get a different animal altogether. It's a judgement call on the part of the artistic directors whether something is traditional, celtic, roots, or singer-songwriter, and whether the act actually performs as expected. Our own AD has a band which has strayed from celtic once or twice but stayed roughly within the roots definition with "in the tradition" singer-songwriting. In any event the song arrangements are fresh and hopefully unusual whether they be new or old songs.

However, there is a shrinking of trad music presenters it seems, especially outside the urban centres. Sure there's Ottawa, Goderich, and Cambridge sustained by creative and insightful booking, but others like Kincardine Scottish, Collingwood, and Windsor suffer from uninformed management more than a lack of audience interest. There is a lot more to presenting trad music than finding pounding bass and drums, or droning pub songs, or quasi-trad songwriting. Lunasa and Crucible are two which would meet my criteria.

To answer the original question about creative interplay between trad and singer-songwriters, yes it can happen. You can have both and still please the audience, or you can present an act which combines the two (Natalie MacMaster, Simon Mayor & Hilary James, Bobby Watt, Dougie Maclean, Barra MacNeils, Tannahill Weavers, J.P. Cormier, etc). I believe there are acts around to fit the bill but that ADs are less than imaginative about booking, whether by bias, budget, or the false security of playing it safe.

But, and it's a big but, we are in the midst of an explosion of both singer-songwriters and recording availability. Everyone with a guitar and a voice is recording songs, and many are marketing them themslves.
There's a glut and festivals are reflecting that reality. Too bad really that it doesn't push the current tripe off the radio, but there it is.

I would have appreciated more trad at the OCFF, but maybe what goes around comes around.

Peace, Mooh.