we are now approaching the point I have been making for 10 years here....we need to save SOME word for a certain kind of 'trad'...."Yellow Submarine" may be, indeed, learned in oral tradition by kids who were not born when everyone knew who The Beatles were, but the records and copyrights and information is stored and available. It is unlikely that the origins of Beatles songs will be lost. In this century, the mechanisms for keeping track of such things has been developed to a very high degree.

    OLD trad, however, was not like that...we know of early references to "Barbry Allen", but no absolute record of an author....and we are unlikely to even find out who 'composed' "False Knight on the Road"....Those early songs, and some other songs that came out of 'front porch singing', and not from commercial sources, often were not 'written' as much as they were shared, compared, developed, improved, lost, found, carried away in memories and reborn in new disguises. They were never copyrighted, never printed by the 'author', and there is no definitive record of the 'original' version. Beatles songs may BE learned orally and changed a bit by various singers, but it will ALWAYS be possible to look up how they were first done.

Some of us...(like me)...have a special interest in those older songs, done before sound recording was available and before anyone made official records of aothorship....so what do we CALL that genré? "Folk" music was used briefly, but the word was too useful, and was co-opted to refer to anything acoustic and vaguely not 'pop'...and now even those labels are fuzzy. If 'folk' can mean almost anything, it means nothing...and if 'trad' is to ALSO mean "anything not directly learned from the source", what must I do to refer to the body of stuff that will forever remain 'anon' (or maybe connected to a name in a footnote in some scholarly text with no other information?).

"Songs you thought were TRAD" is a useful topic, as it refers to the fact that there IS a TRAD that we can mistakenly assign songs with known authors to....we ought to preserve that distinction.