What's different is what happens next - what happens to that song because of what the singer does to it.

Why does anything have to happen next? We live in the here and now, and all that matters is the moment we're in and the provenance of that moment. Does a traditional song die the moment it's collected? So who killed the folk process? No - I think we need to widen the somewhat precious parameters of the 1954 definition and factor in the other ways songs might be transmitted and, therefore, transformed, and, as I've shown, the folk process can be shown to be alive and well. However, that means extending the parameters of what is Folk Music, and there is a reactionary element who don't want that. Funny how all these old radicals were so pitifully conservative when it came to culture. Patronising old bastards the lot of them! Fact is, they don't want Folk Music to be of The Folks, they want to keep it to their Intellectual Elite.

WLD - if you're reading this, you can expect at least one pint from me if our paths cross at Fylde this year; if you then choose to pour that pint over my head, I'll accept that as a baptism.   

To me, that's a bit like defining electric trains as a form of steam train, then saying that if people think steam trains aren't running any more it's because their concept is out of keeping with the reality of steam trains. Things change.

A train is still a train, I think, regardless of the location of the combustion - internal, external, or remote. I think the function is the important thing; the fact of it being a train rather than a skateboard; it still runs on tracks, and through the same cuttings, tunnels and embankments built by navvies long dead; a journey on any train is a journey into the past, like the journey from Poulton-le-Fylde to Manchester Oxford Road, where we might look out and see a replica of The Planet in full steam. Hmmmm. Is that what it's all about? Nostalgic replication? If people want to define Folk Song as being something out of necessity archaic, then that's a cosy idealism which I confess I find as appealing as I do repellent, however - we travel through the same landscapes, transformed on a daily basis & it's like this every time you sing a song, any song, not just a traditional song.   

People used to make music much, much more than they do now - mainly because the option of listening to it without making it was much less widely available - and when they did, things happened to music that don't get a chance to happen now. Other stuff happens instead.

I'm not sure if that's true; maybe the reverse is true. But whatever people used to do in the past, it wasn't necessarily Folk Music as we understand it. I've spoken to old musicians from mining communities who, whilst being fully conversant with the brass band tradition, have never heard any of the mining songs supposedly traditional to those communities. And then we hear tales of Bert Lloyd and Ewan McColl giving concerts at the Tow Law WMC to give the miners back their lost folk songs. I find this very telling as to the nature of Trad. Folk Song and the extent to which it existed at all, compared to the extent people wish to believe it existed. In my family we had fragments of such songs, but always alongside other songs, never in isolation. Whatever the numbers, there are a lot of people making music and singing for pleasure these days - and might I suggest there a lot more people singing Traditional Songs these days than has ever been the case hitherto?