But that's the whole point about tradition - it HAS no focus, or rather you can only focus arbitrarily - with hindsight or some predetermined agenda (as the collectors you mention did), and so give an incomplete view. For an analogy, try putting your video camera on macro and pushing it between the wires in the back of a telephone exchange router.

McGrath and Guest at 06:53 (not me by the way) have it.

The invention of the tape recorder did two things. It changed for ever the way music was transmitted from singer to singer, and it allowed a random snapshot to be taken of 'the tradition' as it happened to be in that period when people felt like doing field recordings - which was no more valid or interesting than it would have been if those recordings had been made two hundred years before, or after, or in a different country. (And similar things happened, for only slightly different reasons, to earlier collectors working with paper and pen).

Many of the songs collected were badly written in the first place, had been mauled in transmission, and were then also wrongly sung for the mic. Very little is actually of real merit as it was collected - which is why Carthy, Coe, Humphreys, Causley, Dylan, Simon et al have to re-write and re-deliver.

They are the heroes of folk music, along with the forgotten people who wrote the collected songs originally - and the people who write entirely new songs in this 'Tradition' today. The skilled writer and the talented revisionist should be celbrated, not the collector or the collected. And people outside the folk enclave (which, sadly means 99% of the people who supposedly own this Tradition) think it's plain bonkers to denigrate the new, purely because it IS new. And that's unhelful to the promotion and survival of folk music.

Of course it's brilliant that these archives exist, and of course they should be made safe, made available and access encouraged. But these collections are just a resource. They contain gems or course - but gems are cheap in all music. Music is always transitory and of the moment. It must be relevent, and interesting, and it must touch the listener's heart - even if IS old - to justify taking up his time.

I don't have to engage with mustrad, so I don't. But others do.

A different attitude would be more helpful all round.