"you are not allowing there for children's songs and football chants:"
You are right of course Mike; I should have given a nod to the tiny handful of exceptions, but I do think they fade into pale insignificance next to what has disappeared. Even the children's songs are very much on the wane, or so I am told by teacher friends.
It is the adult culture I was referring to (I can't speak for the terraces, where I wouldn't venture without protective clothing!)
In spite of very much unqualified and unsubstantiated declarations to the contrary we have become passive recipients of our culture, playing no part whatever in either its making nor its transmission - they have even provided us with hand controls so we don't have to rise out of our armchairs to be entertained or inspired. The present 'canned culture' that we now sold NO LONG SPEAKS FOR US as it once did through our traditional songs and stories.
One of the things we first noticed when we started recording traditional singers, both from Travellers with a living, if ailing tradition, and here in Ireland, with on that had largely disappeared, though still very much within living memory, was how relatively newly composed songs fitted in functionally with the old ones, not just as entertainment, but also as carriers of information, emotions, aspirations, values.... all the things that made the tradition a homogenous whole, as the Topic series put it 'a voice of the people'.
I believe that it is this that has disappeared, not the songs, which will be with us forever in one form or another.
This is why I believe that the jury is very much still 'out' on whether Anahata's statement that "the songs written today will become the trad songs of tomorrow" comes to fruition. I very much hope so; it was MacColl's dream and has always been mine, but.......
Jim Carroll