I'm just listening to the fascinating piece on Manifold on ABC.

I think that there are two traditions in "folk music". Think of a Venn diagram, of two circles, intersecting. The first circle, what might be called "the old tradition", contains a) the tradition itself - the oral transmission of song and story; b) the locus of this transmission (e.g. shearing shed, logging camp, the pub, army camp, rugby shower rooms, fo'c'sle); c) publications used by the this tradition (e.g. broadsides, occasionally notebooks, etc.); and d) the singers themselves.

The second circle is what might be called "the new tradition", which contains a) the tradition itself - the oral transmission of song and story; b) the locus of this transmission (folk club, folk festival, academic folklore departments and conferences); c) publications used by this tradition (books, CD/LP/DVD/MP3's/cassettes, radio/TV/internet, and schools); and d) the singers themselves.

These two circles overlap very little: in the area common to both are the singers of "the old tradition" (now called "tradition bearers" or the like) and the publications of "the old tradition".

Two points to consider:
1. These are two circles, and not one.
2. There are no moral connotations associated with either circle: neither circle is "right" or "wrong" (whatever these words might mean).

Manifold was a passionate, intelligent, motivated and tenacious intellectual and he admired the first circle very much: its intelligence, its community, its musical code. From what I have read by and about him, I gather that he hated what had sometimes happened to "the old tradition" – its transformation by some into middle-class piano-accompanied parlour music, its ossification and dissemination in ossified form by print, and its falling into the hands of professional performers.

Capt. Birdseye's original post, and the preceding and following paragraphs in the introduction to PBAFS, nicely display his awareness of the existence of thee two intersecting circles, and his dialectical recognition that they both helped and hindered each other. Helped: because the second circle needed the first as material, and the first needed the second as a preservative. Hindered: because the second's preservation of the first ossified a living tradition, and the first's "authority" limited the free creativity of the second.

I share many of his concerns. As a researcher, a former teacher and a historian, I have often thought that we'd learn better if we closed down all the schools, the folk tradition would be better if there were no books or recordings, and that we'd understand history better if we blew up all libraries and museums. "The tradition of all dead generations", a German philosopher once said, "weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living ..." I take Manifold to be expressing in the words of his already quoted just this dialectical awareness. I think that Capt. Birdseye did us all a service by opening this discussion.

Jon Bartlett