Tim,
When Sharp was collecting he claimed to be catching the last of a dying culture.
When the BBC collectors went out in the 50s they were 'sweeping up the last echoes of a dying song/music tradition'.
Tom Munnelly collecting in Ireland from the 60s to the 90s described his work as 'A race with the undertaker'.
Pat and I were recording from singers who had been without an audience for most of their lives and in many cases hadn't sung in public for 30, 40, 50 years.
Walter Pardon, apart from Christmas parties and harvest suppers had never sung in public except for 'Dark Eyed Sailor', which nobody else wanted.
The one exception in our case was the Travelling Communities (Irish and Scots) who still had a living tradition up to the mid - seventies, when they stopped singing, making songs and telling stories thanks to the introduction of portable television into the caravans (we can put an exact date on this within an eighteen month period).
To one degree and another we were all recording a remembered tradition rather than a living one.
I would dearly like to believe that somewhere out there, there are still communities making songs and tales which reflect the experiences, beliefs and values of the people living in them.
Despite arguments to the contrary, society as a whole have become passive recipients of culture - they've even supplied us with hand-controls so we don't have to get up out of our armchairs.
Sure, there are clubs where new songs are made and performed, but these are not communities; rather they are small, isolated groups of individuals.
I live in the hope that one day people will once again take part in the creation of their/our own culture. In the meantime we're stuck with what we've got, so let's recognise that fact and try to build on it rather than pretend it's something it's not.
Personally, it doesn't matter to me if the songs are centuries or months old. I still get as much pleasure out of a seventeenth century ballad as I do from Hamlet, or a Dickens or Hardy novel, or a book by John Steinbeck, or a MacColl, or Tawney, or Matt McGinn, or Con 'Fada' O'Drisceoill or Adam McNaughton song - ageless rather than old, I would say.
Jim Carroll