No-one's dissmissing the art form, or reducing the music to a legalistic term. The music stands for itself. We're discussing terminology.

The word Traditional, as applied to music, does have a legal definition, like it or not, whereas the artform is nebulous except in one respect - that, like all art, it belongs to its maker and no-one else.

That's my point.

Good songs will stand for themselves, with or without help from talented interpreters at any stage of their development, while the less good will probably go back into the soup for later.

If songs are well-written in the first place (and you can always tell which ones were) they'll stand less chance of being changed over time. And the person who made a work good enough to stand that test of time deserves recognition (and reward, if appropriate), for the pleasure they've brought to others.

Its important we that recognise that and its implications - and give credit where its due, rather than lionising some singer because he happend to be in the pub when some collector wandered in with a tape machine or a notebook (I'm not taking about you Jim - I'm going back a ways here).

I don't represent the PRS, I'm merely a member. And in fact I share your suspicion of some aspects of their policies re Traditional ownership. For example, I'm not sure that we should be allowed to register arrangements of anon tunes and songs (which I've done many times because they let me), unless we've really made some significant changes.

But this is always going to be a grey area (how much change before it becomes 'significant' for example), so the lawyers are bound to default to a position of trying to maximise revenue for members.

And there are a lot of other issues about PRS and traditional material that have been discussed before. Those were not in my post.

The term was seeking to question - because it's bandied about without, one feels at times, people stopping to think what they are actually saying - is 'THE Tradition'
- as if there was only one stream, one flow of musical development through history - when we all know it's a tumbling brook with many meanders, waterfalls, dams, divisions, diversions and confluences.

It's the notion of ONE mythical method of passage that I suspect may be misguided.

Surely the reality was that singers through history, like today, learned from family, friends, passing strangers, the Church, written music and broadsides - each of which had its own 'tradition' - and that everywhere one goes one finds regional manifestations of this process. THE Tradition is a poor term for such riches.