Azizi,

No doubt you are completely right in this. To me, until a song has evolved so far as to remove nearly all elements of the original singers, origins are vital to understand a song and its setting. Without the setting and cultural orientation (and the greatest possible effort - never popssibly perfect - to understand the words, nuances, codes and references) one might as well be singing rote-memorized unfamiliar language. Of course, most entertainment-singing has no discernable meaning but I don't care about or listen to that.

OTOH, categorizing is another story. Most collectors I've read admit of the flaws in categorizing. Even so simple a distinction as separating sea chanties by type of task or chantey/forcastle or even chantey/ballad, is misleading when a song does two or three functions at different times. After all (eg) "All The Pretty Little Horses" is a 'Southeastern American Lullaby,' among those of other races, and the author wouldn't want to include it twice in two sections.

Dr Greenhaus has often railed (or commiserated) about the                               necessarily artificial and necessarily often misleading results of such categorizing - even while such makes orienting in a book easier for the reader. This, of course, is one of the main geniuses of the Digital Tradition. He intended it to be fully and nonlinearly searchable so category becomes irrelevant. But category is also still usable in the Keywords. Thus a song can have multiple categories - one song might have @religion, @Negro, @lullaby and @spiritual.   (Unfortunately, "All The Pretty Little Horses" only has @lullaby!)