The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #91497 Message #1742144
Posted By: Richard Bridge
16-May-06 - 06:47 PM
Thread Name: Folklore: Adopting Alien Traditions
Subject: RE: Folklore: Adopting Alien Traditions
So, Guest Bob, if I were (as I am) a lot of whisky to the bad, and suffering the whisky nastiness, I might say that the music is, for you, irrelevant to the tradition and vice versa. Is the musician nothing more than an entertainer? I do not subscribe to that. You mention personal traditions. Our own personal traditions - if you like our roots, to analogise the general situation to the AfroAmerican one - must be more relevant to us than those of others, and equally it must be that we are responsible to our own traditions more than we are to those of others.
One question that seems to remain (there are of course others) is: why do so many English Welsh or Scottish players and listeners seem to want to adopt the Irish or American forms rather than their own - why do they bow to those forms of cultural imperialism? Why not French rather than zydeco or cajun? Why is this such a directional traffic? Are there American performers adopting the English traditional muse, or the Spanish or Italian (or South American) one?