This, as the Monty Python team regularly observed, is getting very silly.
I have just had a quick shufti round our book collection and have come up with the following: Folk Songs of the North East, Folk Songs of Somerset, Traditional Tunes of The Child Ballads, Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads, The Ballad of Tradition, English Folk Songs From The Southern Appalachians, The Ballad and The Folk, Folk Songs of New England, Folk Songs From The Catskills, Anglo American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898, The Greig-Duncan Folksong Collection, Ancient Irish Folksongs, North Carolina Folklore – Folk Songs, The Journal of the Folk Song Society, The Folk Music Journal, The British Traditional Ballad In North America, The Penguin Book of English/American/Canadian/Australian Folk Songs, The English Traditional Ballad, Folksong In England – we have a large number of books so the list is somewhat extensive.
It appears to me that those of us who are happy with terms like folk and traditional have history on our side – we've got a pedigree folks (if you don't mind my using that term!) that stretches back nearly a century.
Doesn't it strike anybody as a trifle presumptive that people should come along and inform me, Bronson, Sharp, Greig, Duncan, Gerould, Gummere, Fowke, Crichton, Coffin, Goldstein, Flanders, Brown, Broadwood, Kidson, Grainger, Cazden, Henderson, Shields, Joyce, and those of us who are comfortable with the F and T words, that we can no longer use them and from now we must call them 'source songs', or 'collected songs' or even 'waiting to be collected songs'?
And what about the related disciplines? Do we now have to refer to 'A Dictionary of British 'Waiting To Be Collected' Tales, or Italian 'Collected' Tales, or The Motif Index of 'Source' Literature, or maybe even Modern Greek 'Good Old Days' Tales.
I wont even begin on our folklore (or should I say 'old timey' lore) or tradition (or 'what we did centuries ago') collection.
And what about the organisations, magazines and web sites? Traditional Song Forum, English Folk Dance And Song Society, Musical Traditions, The Living Tradition.
Poor old Nicholas Carolan of the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin has just undergone an extremely expensive move of premises; which of you is going to be the one to tell him he is now going to have to reach into his pocket again and cough up for a new nameplate for the front door?
And what guarantee are you going to give us that you're not going to come along in six months or a years time and tell us we've got to change again because you like our name better than yours and you would like to use it?
Gi'e us a break Jimmy!
However, don't despair; perhaps there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Those of you advocating change have not even attempted to come up with a half-decent definition (Bob Coltman tried - sort of, but he was rather diffident, as if he wasn't quite convinced himself). Nor have you tried seriously to challenge the established definition, but rather, have taken the beautifully apposite path trodden by Humpty Dumpty in saying "a word means what I want it to mean" (it appears to be purely fortuitous that you don't want to call your songs hip-hop, or opera or tralaleri). Might I suggest that how you identify the various types of songs under discussion is your problem, not ours. We have perfectly acceptable terms which not only identify the songs but go some way to describing their creation and dissemination. As much as I'd like to help, it really is up to you to find a suitable name for YOUR songs – sorry – this seat is taken.
It should be remembered that no matter how often words are misused or mispronounced, genealogy will always be an 'alogy' and not an 'ology'.
Jim Carroll