Ian says:

"As I get older I understand less and less why my way of learning songs - books, or other singers, or CDs, or old records - is any less 'folk process' than so-called 'traditional folk singers'. They learned their songs their way because that was what was available to them. In learning songs their way, they changed them a little (or a lot), as others had done before them. That's the folk process, surely? I - and others like me - learn my songs my modern way because modern methods are available to me. This is more national or even global than local, but this is the world I inhabit. In learning songs my way, I change them a little (or a lot), as others had done before me. That's also the folk process, surely?"

Yes it's A 'folk' process, but it's not the SAME 'folk' process as the one which informed the creation of what, to avoid confusion, I'm currently callng The Wellspring. (The 'Oral Only Etc' process).

Did you read what I said about niches? You're not isolated within a niche. You're not learning from a rarified source. You're learing songs against a background of a mass-media driven consumer market. You hear a lot of stuff from all over the place. So your interpretations will be informed by the global village, not just the village you were born in.

If we are to respect this music, we must all start by taking the trouble to understand the difference between slow, localised, community-based evolution*, and mass-media-informed evolution (*tempered by, of course, some manuscript and lyricl writing which DID travel faster than 'song of mouth').

This won't stop us changing songs, making radical new arrangments, fusing them with any other musical style we fancy - that's not the issue.

We have total freedom to create, and that's as it should be.

But we don't own this music, and we do have a duty also to respect our sources, and to pass them on along with our new innovations.

And that means taking the trouble to at least try to understand the Wellspring's place in society - in, ok if I must, in folklore.

If we allow the values of the post-revivial tradition (which are exceptional in themselves) to become muddled with the values of the pre-revivial tradition (see why I'm using Wellspring?) we blur this distinction to the point of corruption.

And that IS wrong, because that DOES begin to damage the archive, and our ablilty to attribute, to learn from source, to track back upstream etc etc.

That's all I'm saying.