When I first saw the thread title I resisted the urge to even look at it, predicting a fruitless discussion. Living in a place where the dominant culture is immigrant but resisting the ownership of some of the baggage that comes with being the dominant culture I see resonances in some of the discussion above. Even so, it's been really informative.

But it took Paul Burke's post to lure me into contributing. He wrote "Imagine for example versions of the same tune- for the sake of argument, let's say "Soldier's Joy"- and hear it played by

- An Irish fiddler in the Coleman style
- An Irish fiddler in Donegal style
- An English dance band fiddler of the 60s generation
- A Scottish fiddler
- A Shetland fiddler
- A Northumbrian fiddler
- A Cape Breton fiddler
- An Old Time fiddler.... (the list goes on)"

For at least the last 20 years or so I've used exactly the same list and for a very similar purpose, at least initially. I've been trying to get beginner players to really listen to the music they hear and that tune with that list is ideal for such a purpose.

But back to the thread. In Australia I've been exposed to really good singers and instrumentalists from almost all the places mentioned above as Anglo-Saxon or Celtic and some that weren't (Balkan, Iranian etc). I've also been lucky enough to have heard many of the people mentioned above, 'live' as well as on records. And I've also been even luckier to be able to go to the places where the music mentioned has been regarded as endemic.

In a multicultural place like Australia it's almost impossible to be emphatic about origins of a tune or a style or even a set of words, unless you can trace back to what our geneologists describe as 'the immigrant generation' and, even then, you usually get back to a context that is usually much more heterogeneous than classification can deal with.

Melodies, styles, decorations, words, motifs are all memes and, like genes, get swapped around wherever and whenever transients gather. Lots of academics reckon that pattern analysis and classification is an esential part of the human condition, which is why we all do it. Sometimes fruitlessly. But there's lots of really good stuff that comes out of the woodwork when someone asks a 'stupid question'. Thank you Blind Will!

Cheers, Rowan