First, you have

Folk music set up on a pedistal is going nowhere - if you want a tune with no ending 'to resolve' then what you do is make one up - because that is what happens when musicians make music. A tune will get away, it runs like water or sand, from one player to the next, from one playing to the next, gliding between instruments and keys and modes and minds and from one playing to the next and never quite the same always taking a little but leaving more, and always from one playing to the next so it is not and never will be what one person thinks of it, because it is always something old and new and borrowed and you can even blue it ... recording it is just like making water into ice, a pause, nothing more.

Then Dave Polshaw sums up his intepretation

What the author appears to be saying is that good music is not worth recording.

Huh?

You really DO have a frozen moment in time, no matter how good the music is. Real life isn't that way, and folk music in the real world isn't that way. I've known people who've recorded a song, but never played it the same way before or after.

And there really should be not criticism of 'good enough for folk'. REAL folk music has to be learned, little children play and sing it, old people whose voices are worn or whose hands don't work as well as they used to, and everybody in between who are just trying to improve. They're not perfect and may not even be good, but they're 'good enough for folk'.

They wouldn't be good enough to record. I wouldn't buy a recording of someone who wasn't a lot better than the average community musician, but recordings are where folk meets pop. Recordings are 'hot' today and totally forgotten tomorrow. Radio stations, at least in the US, play newer releases, and if it's older than a month, possibly less, it's hardly ever played. Radio stations exist to sell records and to give people a taste of what's new. We wind up with charts and polls and awards and all sorts of pop music industry features used for folk.

So, you talk about your folk recordings as if they were pop, and the most important thing is the musicianship, not the music. I will search scratchy 30-year-old recordings all the way up to modern recordings - folk, pop or otherwise - for music I want to learn. Then I will go play it somewhere with other people. I will try to be good and will enjoy it. I will likely change it even if I try not to, but I probably won't record it.

This 'living tradition' doesn't exist to support the recording industry, but the recording industry can help people find and learn songs. At best, the relationship is symbiotic. At worst, some poor soul comes along who tries to make people believe if you aren't good enough to be a 'star', you shouldn't try. You can feel whatever way about it you like, but I and my friends will keep singing.

Oh, and I'd hope future ad hominem attacks aren't tolerated here.
That looks like the fatal trend in the thread started by someone asking about a piece of music used for an advert.