Cap'n,
Walter was not wrong; he was using his 'melodeon test' on his own repertoire and as far as I can judge he was pretty accurate.
However, you missed my point; perhaps I didn't make it well enough.
One of the most persistent arguments against discriminating between traditional and non traditional songs is that traditional singers didn't, so why should we? In our experience this is not true. In the cases were we were able to ask singers about their songs, all of them regarded traditional songs differently from others in their repertoire, though they may not use the same terms as we would (Mary Delaney always talked about "my Daddy's songs" - she learned very few from her father). Other Irish singers commonly talked about traditional or come-all-ye's.
Walter, who was in my opinion one of the most important English singers of the twentieth century, (along with fellow East Anglians Harry Cox and Sam Larner) was the most articulate of the singers we recorded and always called his traditional material 'folk songs'. From his notebooks he was discriminating about his family's songs as early as 1947 when he first started writing them down.
This thread seems to be treading water at the moment (hardly surprising – it's nearly run as long as 'The Mousetrap').
I don't know whether we answered Soldier Boy's question to his satisfaction – god knows we tried, and we even avoided being abusive (except me – sorry).
In his last posting he asked a question about our specifying the songs we would regard as traditional folk – and I added the suggestion that we gave our reasons. If people feel this is not worth doing I am not sure where we go from here; maybe we should quit while we are ahead, before we run completely out of steam
Jim Carroll
PS Ron, can't speak for the States, but it's certainly not been the case in the UK if my recent experiences with the clubs are anything to go by - out-of-tune singing of anything from pop songs of various eras of the 19th and 20th centuries to navel gazing; on several occasions performed by 'singers' reading them from crib sheets.
Sorry, don't regard either Cohen or Dylan as traditional unless you stretch the word out of shape until it becomes meaningless.