To take a fresh tack based on a singer's practical needs and pleasures, let's think about "Era" for a moment.

I sing a very wide variety of songs including banjo tunes, ballads, blues, cowboy songs, broadsides, ancient stuff derived from 19th century pop, prairie songs, love lyrics, work songs, etc. They are almost all folksongs ... traditional songs ... whatever term you prefer.

As to origin, they come from the Anglo-American and African-American traditions. (I love many other kinds of folksongs from Mexican, French and Spanish to subcontinental Indian and Chinese, but they aren't in my repertoire, I just hum them around the house. So I'm leaving those out of consideration here.)

I strongly like some contemporary songs and singers. But in what I really sing -- that must be some kind of acid test, don't you think? -- "era" matters. In short, I find in selecting repertoire I rarely if ever choose a song **newer** than about 1940.

Aha! Found out! you cry. A pre-WWII song chauvinist! And it's true. And why is this?
Simply stated, I just have not found many, if any post-1940 songs that feel essential to my musical heart and soul.

This is pretty harsh of me. It eliminates, for example, some songs I love. Just a few examples off the top of my head, "I Saw Her As She Came and Went," "Got My Mojo Workin'," "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," "Everybody's Talkin'", Mike Heron's "Hedgehog Song," the wonderful "Geronimo's Cadillac," "Abilene," "Goofus," and "Dirty Old Town" would be some of many, not to mention "Mustang Sally," "Tie Me Kangaroo Down," Tom Waits' exquisite "Tom Traubert's Blues," and "Heartbreak Hotel," which I find riveting quite apart from Elvis.

(By the way it also eliminates every last one of the literally thousands of songs I personally have written, including "Before They Close the Minstrel Show," "Lonesome Robin," "Weaver Bird," "Web of Birdsong," etc., so don't say I'm not principled!)

What seems to matter for me, in staying closest to pre-1940s songs, is style and outlook.

Doesn't matter to me that "somebody known wrote it." Some of the songs I sing are indeed of known authorship, like W. S. Hays' "Curtains of Night" ("I'll Remember You Love in My Prayers:), just to pick one. That's not a barrier.

Arbitrarily choosing a year like this seems puerile and trivial. But before 1940 (and dating back into the 15th century -- roughly as far back as folksongs have survived for us) -- the kinds of songs I have come to love throughout a long life as singer and sometimes performer were generated and sung in styles I have come to feel at home with. After 1940 they weren't. It's that simple.

I'm not alone. Godrich and Dixon, in their standard blues discography, break off after 1942 -- for many reasons, among which are the coming of electric blues and distinct changes in style after WWII due to the national, cultural and racial intermixing the war caused. (Wars always create artistic style breaks for this reason.)

Tony Russell followed suit in his Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942.

Since 1940 collectors of traditional folksongs have at times found good songs -- Frank Warner is an example -- but the songs they collected almost invariably dated back before 1940.

It's not just a matter of my chosen field, traditional songs. Even the popular songs before 1940 were distinctly different from their successors post-1940 to the present. Different in every way, but most of all in viewpoint, and thus in sound. Swing began to destroy the pre-1940s gestalt, rock finished it off -- for better or worse, and I do NOT imply a value judgment in this, I'm only stating a fact.

Showing my age (69) I guess ... but I prefer to sing and play songs that dated from before I was three years old.

So, for me, "traditional songs" are the core of a preference of musical era as well as a preference of genre. They simply sound right to me, as songs. And as a practical matter those kinds of songs don't date any newer than 1940. Regardless how I may dote on newer songs, I, a strongly tradition-influenced American revival singer, don't personally sing them. It's not a matter of self-limiting -- I'd be glad to sing newer stuff if it worked for me. But it just doesn't seem to "go with" me and doesn't feel as good, and would not, somehow, mix well with the core stuff I do.

Oddly, it would be easier to mix "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "April Showers" with my repertoire -- those are two of many pop songs of the same era -- than to mix in more modern things. I don't entirely know why. Does that make me an old fart? (Don't answer that.)

All this contradicts what I've said above, where I've argued that traditional song keeps making itself and will do so on into the indefinite future. That's the difference between ideal and practical points of view.

My singer's viewpoint is very far away from, and less internally consistent than, the points discussed above about legal rights and definitions. This is just one singer's day-to-day preference and bone-marrow feeling as to what is, or is not, his repertoire. My guess is that any of us, as singers, will tend to make these sorts of private definitions about our own songlist preferences based on "feel" -- which may be very different from our attempts to set up definitions or assert idealistic or logical categories.

Not sure how useful, or not, this is. Reading it over, I tend to think not very. Yet similar assertions of preference are implicit everywhere behind the contributions to this thread. In the interests of clarity, I thought it might be interesting to take this different view and see how it plays out.

Wow, what a subject. Easier not to think about, and just sing.   Bob