Dear Mudcatters,

First of all, the fifty year rule was indeed a joke. But I care very much about traditional music, as over against contemporary music, which drowns it out numerically, sonically, and in terms of exposure. I feel many, if not most songwriters are adrift in a world of their own, with no boundairies and no reference points. Fortunately, this is a curable condition, all it takes is consistent immersion and the proactive seeking out of mentors. I would like to see more of that in the folk world, but realize that most of the mentors available in my day are now deceased.

I knew that when I first saw Rev. Gary Davis and a bunch of other old guys at the Brandeis Festival in 1963. Gary was as old as my Uncle Julius, and I was old enough to know that Julius wouldn't last forever, therefore neither would Rev. Davis.

That fact is, FAI is numerically dominated, more than ten to one, by songwriters. I cherry-picked through the entire population for my sixty six showcase slots, and negotiated individually with grounded songwriters, asking that they do traditional material, rather than their own material. I turned a few people down who clearly had no understanding of traditional music, and thought that what they were doing by writing new songs was itself a tradition, therefore their own songs were traditional. I sent a bunch of young'uns off to You Tube with suggestions on who t o look at, and glommed onto every radical 78-ist I could find.

I am fond of pointing out that Homo erectus used a tool kit that consisted of the Acheulian hand-axe for a MILLION YEARS, and against that, any other human tradition looks pretty paltry. I have nothing against singer/songwriters, though I kid them a lot. Clearly, a song with brand new copyright registration on it is not a folk song. Time will edit most out, some into tradition, just as it did for Midnight Special and Wildwood Flower. For the record, I was able to sample most kinds of commonly performed traditional music, Blues, balladry, at least a dozen foreign language performers, not to mention Brian MacNeill and Archie Edwards.

I told the manager of one young Bluegrass band that I would like it if t hey played Flatt and Scruggs, but not so much if they concentrated on Sam Bush. I never shut anyone down for singing a forty-nine year old song (which Mike Agranoff purposely did, 'Don't Think Twice'.

My bull's eye here was 93 year old Violet Hensley of Yellville, Arkansas, quite a fiddler even at her advanced age, and who made the very fiddles she played. Violet was the recipient of the first Mike Seeger Scholarship, designed to bring unarguably traditional people to the conference so as to compete on an equal footing with all the youngsters and their newly minted material, for spots at the same run of gigs everybody in FA plays.

There were several other old folks at the conference, notably Bill Hearne, a country singer from Texas, and Delmer Holland, a fiddler from middle Tennessee. And there were a bunch of younger people playing OT music and Blues. Living traditions, like Sacred Steel and Bluegrass, were represented quite well, though I don't know how much of the material those guys did had any age on it.

I am an Anthropologist, not a Folklorist, though in my work and life I handle mostly folkloric material. I have my own way of calculating whether a piece is traditional or not, and while there are a bunch of conditionals that make it cumbersome to express in sound bites, I'd be happy to walk any of you through the ins and outs of this now-familiar thicket of philosophical argument, if you are serious about it.

Some sensible person in this discussion pointed out that the fifty year rule was a shorthand mnemonic, and that was essentially correct. Any and all criticism or praise (Thank you Deb, Art, Ron and Ted), the buck stops here. I'm on FB, and my normal email address is . You can reach me at as well.

Andy Cohen