"The old songs are being preserved in the clubs, the new songs are not being taken up, adapted and passed on; by your own words 'ordinary people' don't get to hear them. They remain static and unchanged, and more often than not composers hang a price tag (copyright) on them so they don't travel."

Some of these statements are simply not true. The old songs *are* being preserved and changed, many new songs *are* being taken up, adapted and passed on. As explained below, they do *not* remain static and unchanged, and although copyright exists on many songs, most writers are more than happy that their songs are sung, and even changed. That's the way the songs get known, and someone may get round to recording them. All they want is acknowledgement that they were written by them. Most are only concerned about copyright when money is being made out of singing and/or recording them.

"any changes that might be happening to the songs appear to me to be happening within the context of the clubs, not communities as a whole, and are deliberate, self-conscious ones"

The changes are happening largely within the context of the folk scene generally, rather than just the clubs, and yes, I think that does constitute a community of a kind, but I can't accept that many of the changes are deliberate, self-conscious ones, or that quite a few of the songs aren't learnt by oral transmission rather than through recordings, books, etc. The more well-known ones are absorbed almost by osmosis, often gleaned from the singing of many different people, and therefore changes do take place quite by accident and unconsciously. I'm not saying this makes them traditional necessarily, but it does go some way to fulfilling the 1954 definition.

And no, this doesn't apply to the works of Butterworth, etc., as those changes were totally conscious, require performance generally by an orchestra or a group of musicians reading from the (fixed) dots, and not passed on to others to perform in any other way.

Sadly, your experience has caused you to have a very jaundiced view of the folk scene in England, and I think there are quite large parts of it that don't deserve your cynicism.

Barbara