Lol Jim - I can't let that one by!

You're right to say that it's wrong for people to claim traditional song as their own property - but not many do (not these days, anyway). Those who do this should be exposed and rightful attribution restored.

But registering an arrangement, or an adaptation of a traditional song, is not the same as claiming the song itself.

It's crucial that people understand this, and they might easily get the opposite impression from your post.

What Simon Emmerson is doing with the VIllage project is really no different in law and in culture to what any songbearer ever did: Taking a song he likes, and making it shipshape for a new audience. Yes, the setting may be more dramatic, and the changes more radical, but the song survives. It has reached new audiences, and been given a new breath of life. Now even more people can take it on board, and, if they choose to, strip out the additions (which, thankfully, is easy to do with trad songs, because we have lots of different versions on record from which to triangulate).

It's important that we remember, as I've said elsewhere, that it is the song that endures - not the singers. Trad songs were all the creation of a writer once, and they have surived as songs because the writer had enough skill with words and tune to create a work with such integrity that all the tweking and arranging and rewriting over the years has not extinguished the essential essence of the song.

THIS is what needs to be preserved and nourished and celebrated. Not the style of any individual interpreter or goup, who's contribution has been aznd can be endlessly evolved.

Now, perhaps your passion is for the singers themselves, their sound, their style, the whole world of them and their music. Indeed, many people would be happy to hear Walter Pardon, for example, intoning the phone book on one note, and that might include me! But few other singers would be likely to register an arrangement of that!

No, it's simply not reasonable to separate one form of 'evolution' from another. Morally; you must either say 'no trad song can ever be altered in any way,' or you can allow alteration, and just accept that you won't like some of the alterations.

Legally, as I've explained above, you don't have a choice - alteration is not a crime. Copyright law exists of necessity, and it lapses of necessity too, and the result is the system we have today. It's not just folk songs, or even music in general this happens with. It's everything.

But if you do put your field recordings on line, then a lot more people will be bale to hear the charm and integirty of those singers. And they may like you fall in love with the whole thing. And perhaps they'll decided this is how they like to hear these songs sung. The may even decided to learn a song from Simon, and sing it a bit like Walter.

Now, wouldn't that be a good thing?