"The main problem I have with the 1954 Definition (and its conventional interpretation) is that like a lot of other Folkloric theory it romanticises community by effectively denying the creative genius of the individual. My feeling is that the creative work of the singers is overlooked in defining them merely as song carriers, who are part of The Tradition, the mechanism of which is The Folk Process."

I don't know, SS. Perhaps it's because we live in different parts of the world, but I have not found that to be the case. I find that there is plenty of latitude for creativity in choosing which version of a song I will sing, more often than not out of many to choose from, how I will sing it, how I will accompany it, and whether or not I will sing the words as I find them or make judicious modifications—without altering the meaning—in order to make a line more singable.

I know that there are folkies who are adamant about singing a song exactly as is, the way they heard someone sing it on a field recording, or exactly as they found it in a song book. The first is pointless because, first of all, the person on the field recording sang the song their own way, which was probably not exactly the same way they learned it, and second, if the field recording is the "definitive version," this brings the folk process to a screeching halt; why bother to learn the song? Just play the recording! And secondly, written music and a set of words in a book only give the most rudimentary idea of how a song (or any piece of music, for that matter) should be performed. And this also goes for classical music learned from a score. You can't help but bring a measure of creativity to learning a piece of music and performing it because you are using your own notions of how it should be done.

Every time a song is performed, it is a re-creation of that song. No singer, no matter how cleverly imitative they are, can sing a song exactly the same way someone else sang it. And further, no individual singer can sing a song exactly the same way every time.

I don't think anyone is cavalierly "dismissing" the original songwriter. With any given song, someone wrote it. And with traditional songs, oftentimes a new set of words is grafted to an existing tune—or vice versa—or an existing song is modified to meet new circumstances or tell a new story. But in the vast majority of cases with traditional songs, we don't know who this person is or who these people are. Who wrote "Barbara Allen?" Who wrote "Jock o' Braidesley?" Were these original songs? Or were they re-doings of prior songs? But they have been modified over time, either intentionally or unintentionally (by mis-hearing words or forgetting them and trying to reconstruct them).

This is the form that communal authorship takes. "Communal authorship" does not mean that a committee of people called a meeting and got together to write a song, although a few early song collecters believed this to be the case.

So with a song like "The Water is Wide" (many versions composed of "floating verses"—verses found in different contexts in other songs) or "The Streets of Laredo" (an example of an old song rewritten to fit new circumstances), who is the original songwriter?

Or did John Jacob Niles invent all folk songs in his basement back in 1910 as he was sometimes given to claim?

Don Firth