I assume that you agree with your acolyte that we're all "a bunch of complete C-words after all?"

I don't actually. For a start I see you all in terms of your individuality, however so entrenched you each might be in the rhetorical orthodoxy of The Revival which (in your hands especially, old man) manifests as a lumpen fundamentalism replete with theological absolutes which we dare but question at our peril. Even more perverse is your habit of railing against anything I say without bothering to see how it might actually accord with your own feelings on the matter. Even when I directly comment on the significance on your work in the field I am roundly abused despite you having passed onto me recordings from your archives in the past.

The situation is such that The Tradition can (and must) be appreciated without resource to the more wayward theorising of The Revival. The recordings are there, the collections, thanks to the diligence and hard work of people like your better self, and Max Hunter (a vacuum cleaner salesman?) How you personally interpret and understand your archive with respect of your fundamentalist folk-faith is of little significance to me or posterity; that's your subjective opinion, to which you're entitled. The music is all that matters, the cataloguing and the annotation, and your openness and thoroughness in this respect is, I must say, exemplary, standing in stark contrast to your Mudcat persona - at least that you've affected fir purposes of these threads. One only hopes you take the exemplary scholarship even further by taking advantage of the available technology to get the whole lot on-line where it might be appreciated by a wider public of both casual enthusiasts and serious scholars alike.

In the end it doesn't matter if you believe in letter of the 1954 Definition and believe the Folk Process and Oral Tradition to be fundamental laws of the known universe; fact is, they are not, rather they are theoretical perspectives ossified into absolutes by the distinct lack of new thinking on the subject. This in itself is a pitiful state of affairs and one that ensures the songs of The Tradition are forever condemned to languish in a cultural ghetto presided over by those who have evidently failed to appreciate their true value. Consequently Folk has become a joke; a risible cliché which is unfortunately justified by the attitudes we find here - the malicious slime trails of The Snail, the snickering sycophancy of the worryingly-anonymous GUEST: Shimrod, and the open vitriol of Jim Carroll, and one or two others who stare like rabbits into the headlights of the oncoming folk-future determined by an ever ageing demographic who did little to encourage, engender or facilitate the missing 2nd, 3rd and 4th generations when maybe there was a chance - so much so that even at 48 - a year older than Peter Bellamy was when he left the planet - I am still invariably the youngest in a folk club.

And how do the old guard address this sorry state of affairs? With encouraging comments like As far as Sean's singing is concerned... it is as far away from good folk singing as I believe it possible to get. Times like this I might just go off and buy that Fender Jazz I saw in Liverpool last week after all and leave folk to disappear up its own arse.   

But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will sing there at all...

Who'll come a-carolling, who'll come a-carolling,
Who'll come a-carolling, a-carolling with me?
Not I said the young man, mashing jams on his comput-tie-ah;
I'll not come a-carolling, a-carolling with you.