Pip said "I believe the folk process is basically over, because the oral tradition is basically dead - killed by the ubiquity of broadcast music and recorded music."

Recordings have not killed the folk process. It can be seen at work in the folk clubs. My namesake Richard Bridge has just admitted to perpetrating it, and I've heard others: e.g. in The Weary Whaling Grounds "the flying jib points home" has been turned into "our fine ship points for home" -- not only a mondegreen but inconsistent with the rest of the song. In The Galway Shawl I've heard "We kept on walking, SHE kept on talking", giving a whole new subtext to the song: the girl was a chatterbox, perhaps better left behind and remembered than she would have been as a wife. The subtle detail in successive verses of McColl's "Schooldays are over" (is that the right title?) -- John is a "pitman", Dai is a "miner", and Jim is a collier, respectively suggesting the North-East, Wales and Scotland -- gets lost in a random interchange of these terms.

But to return to the original subject of this thread, there's one aspect that I haven't seen mentioned yet.

As well as the question whether a change to traditional material is for the better or the worse, which is certainly a subjective judgement, there's also whether it is true to the tradition and to the original material. That is also to some extent a subjective judgement, but not totally. Some collected tradition bearers either weren't very good singers or were long past their prime when recorded. Singing their songs in tune and putting pauses for breath at appropriate points in the text, rather than when one's breath happens to run out, makes an aesthetic improvement without violating any spirit of the original. Adding an accompaniment may or may not be an improvement, depending on taste; but adding a rumpty-tumpty jolly accompaniment to a song of tragedy (such as The Jam of Gerry's Rocks, which I recently heard treated thus) implies a serious disregard for the essence of the song.

Richard