Oh dear, even the 'talking horse' merchants didn't take it this far!

Ethnomusicologists would though, Jim; the ICTM likewise. Whilst I am passionate about Traditional English Speaking Folk Song, I don't believe it to be essentially any different from any other music. According the 1954 Definition, all music is Folk Music anyway; the only difference is one of stylistic convention; those of The Revival are different again. The Horse Definition trumps it by placing the onus for cultural creativity on the Folk - the human individuals who are all too easily forgotten about with all this talk of an abstract (and very conditional) community and even more abstract folk process, which are, I feel, illusions of a generality that in which the details (i.e. the individuals) of what we're actually dealing with here have been at best overlooked and, at worst, all too conveniently ignored.

The Tradition relates to the pre-revival condition of English Folk Song - before it was told what it was, before the taxonomy began which leads to the trainspotter mindset that typifies the revival enthusiast. I include myself in this; the difference being that I now believe the songs to be the product of a creative tradition of master vernacular craftsmanship with respect of song making, singing, carrying and subsequent transformation which spread throughout the English Speaking world. Such skill still exists in pockets, throwing up some fine songs in the idiom of the tradition, many of which I've sang in the faith of them being traditional until being informed otherwise. Bring Us a Barrel is a case in point, and several Ron Baxter songs in my repertoire have inspired the question When was that collected?

In one thing I hope we can all agree, that Traditional English Speaking Folk Song and Ballad represents the finest literature there is. How they got that way is another issue, but it was certainly no accident; they were made, written, printed, sang, passed on, perfected, re-made, modified, expanded, reduced, by people who knew what they were doing. That is The Tradition, the primary paradise of traditional folk song; a veritable dream-time in which we find them scampering in the new-mown meadows of what some of us still perceive as an agrarian utopia, before the advent of chemical fertilisers and mechanisation.