Sorry if you feel I'm insufficiently civil, Ron. But you, too, have to be prepared to accept that not everyone agrees with you. Disageement is not necessarily incivility.

I don't see how my saying that a song I've written is a "folk song" makes it a folk song any more than if I wrote a piano sonata or a string quartet and proclaimed it a "classic" actually makes it a classic.

I can write these things in the style of a Harlan County coal mining song or a fo'c'sle chantey, or a string quartet in the style of Beethoven or Schubert, but it is not for me to say that the song is a "folk song" or the quartet is a "classic."

The artist I mentioned above who said that an artist's most valuable tool is his wastebasket, when asked what he did, responded, "I paint pictures." People would usually say, "Oh, you're an artist?" "Well, I paint pictures," my friend would say. "Whether I am an artist or not is for others to decide, not me."

Ric was not a particularly humble person. But he didn't like to make grandiose claims that might ultimately be judged embarrassingly false.

This is my last post to this thread.

Don Firth