". . . traditions exist due to folks being impressed by how their forebears did things. . . ."

To a certain extent that may be true, but I can't say that I buy that entirely, especially as far as music and song is concerned. I found that the songs appealed to me on their own, not because my forebears sang them. The family I grew up in did not sing the songs their forebears sang. I picked it up from contemporaries who were interested in folk music, and most of them had picked it up from recordings or song books.

And this, incidentally but importantly, was back in the early 1950s, some years before the beginning of the popular folk boom in the United States. Folk songs were considered by most people to be pretty esoteric stuff. I just happen to fall in with a small group of college students, one of whom had first become interested from listening to Burl Ives records while in his early teens (Burl Ives was about the only folk singer who ever got any radio play before the Kingston Trio's recoding of "Tom Dooley" came along in 1958) and liked the fact that the songs were a) different from what he heard on the radio, and b) they told stories.

It was the poetic and aesthetic appeal of the songs themselves, not that they were something his—or my—forebears did.

Don Firth