Well, there is another thing to be said for taking folk music seriously - it keeps flibbertigibbits out.


Sweeney - you seem to be saying that there is no such thing as folk music, because collectors denied that any contribution to the shaping of older material was purposeful.

As I have said above, the way(s)in which older musical materials (including for this purpose words) may have included intentional changes, and they may have included accidental changes. Certainly the phenomenon of "Chinese Whispers" is a known phenomenon and I cannot imagine that you deny that it occurs. Likewise, before bit-for-bit replication became possible all forms of replication were imprecise and repeated replication became a source of imperfect replication. To suppose suddenly that all changes in an old work were the result of the intentions of perfect craftsmen would be an extraordinary assumption.

You, however, set up an aunt Sally that goes further. You assert that the collectors and analysts before you universally proceeded on the basis that the evolution of old works arose ONLY from error, and unthinking error at that. One wonders that so many of them might have made such an assumption until you (and Glueman) arrived to set them right. It seems to me the better view that they did not make that assumption.

Both the above arguments are fatal to your bedrock.

But even if you were right on both accounts, the answer would still be "so what?" There would still be a body of collected (and uncollected, yet, maybe) work (to which, if you can accept recent "Chinese whispers" and planned changes as equivalent to the effects of oral transmission, there is continued accretion) that would be the result of modification in transmission, and that had currency in divergent forms in particular communities - rather like the differences between the Bonnie Raitt version and the Freddie and the Dreamers' version of "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody", or the word changes between "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" and "Si Tu Dois Partir" and the greater changes that would result if one translated the latter back into English.

That leaves one with two questions. First, what is the true source of your hostility to folk music, and why do you want to use the expression "folk music" for something else? Or are you simply trying to say that you are cleverer than everyone else, which might be inferred to be your intent from your frequent resort to the bafflegab thesaurus. Alas my attempt to parody it seems to have been too successful for some, but why do you do what you do and why do you express it like that?