Hi Bryan, pleased you had a good time.
"What are those parameters? Who defines them? Where can they be found?"
C'mon Bryan, I'm sure you know what these parameters are: MacColl, Seeger, Matt McGinn, Cyril Tawney, Pete Smith, Eric Bogle, Con 'Fada' O'Drisceol, Adam McNaughton, Ed Pickford, Enoch Kent..... all using traditional styles and formats to compose new material. It has even been claimed that songs like Freeborn Man and Shoals of Herring actually passed into the tradition; (not by me, I hasten to add).
Set those parameters, as most clubs I went to did, and your audiences are given the choice of what they wish to listen to - a million miles from SS's 'make it up as you go along as long as it is in a designated folk context'.
Who sets the parameters; the club committee using a bit of common nouse - that's who (you know them - the ones who should also be setting the standards).
Did anybody declare the folk revival dead? - must have missed that one; certainly weren't me.
More later when I tackle your earlier posting.
"Tricky stuff this tradition."
Not when you accept that folk is a process, not a style of composition or a type of song. It's what happens to a song once it is passed on that makes it folk.
Example;
This part of West Clare has had an extremely strong songwriting tradition; during our collecting here we must have recorded dozens of songs composed around incidents or features of the area. These included around 12 political songs from the Irish War of Independance, 3 about local elections (including when DeValera was elected for Clare), 4 on the sinking of the French ship, The Leon X111, 3 on the local single-track railway, comic songs about drunken sprees, fashion, local murders, hair styles, fairs and markets... you name it. The largest section of these were praise songs of the area (Lovely Old Miltown, etc, and emigration). Although nearly all of these must have been composed well within the lives of the singers and in spite of our efforts, we were unable to discover the names of 1 single composer. The composers had never claimed ownership of the songs and the singers either were unable, or were not interested in finding out, so the songs simply passed into the local repertoires. When we recorded the same song from different singers, they were invariably different versions.
Even when singers kept notebooks to jot down their new songs the written version differed, sometimes considerable, from the sung one.
The same applied, to a lesser extent with the Travellers.
Jim Carroll