CS said "I still find it innapropriate to conflate the body of material archived from the old oral tradition, with modern songs of the revival which have been inspired by them."

Of course there's a difference, but I don't think it's any greater than the differences within the old oral tradition. (And by the way that tradition hasn't been purely oral for several centuries. It was mediated by the broadside presses. It was even mediated by the earliest collectors: versions have been collected that seem to derive from versions published by Sir Walter Scott, which were to some degree of his making, not as in circulation before he got at them. But that's a digression.)

CS: "Any amount of types of modern songs could pass into what might come to constitute 'traditional songs' in the future, not merely modern revival songs that have been intentionally composed in the 'folk idiom'. As I said elsewhere, my money would be on popular material by bands like The Beatles or Abba."

Quite plausible. Future generations, like past and present generations, will choose what they feel inclined to sing, whether or not it fits particular categories that anyone else recognises.

CS: "Though I think that revival songs will end up being recognised as a body of material in their own right, whether such songs eventually become considered to be 'traditional' in the same sense as songs from the old oral tradition are."

They might be assigned to their own category, but the dividing lines will be very hard to draw. Writers like Cyril Tawney on this side of the Pond and Utah Phillips on the other side wrote new songs of kinds that already existed: and that is itself one facet of the tradition. Which category would (for example) Tommy Armstrong's songs fall into? Or Banjo Patterson's (where they had tunes at the time, or even where they have been given tunes since his time)?

All of that said, my own tastes are close to what I gather CS's to be from her postings. By and large I prefer the songs that have passed the test of time, but I do also like some of the newer ones.

Just to stir the pot a bit more: recognising that much of the "traditional" repertoire consists of songs that were originally created as new songs some time in the last few centuries, I have some sympathy for James Reeves's phrase "the dross of centuries". Perhaps "dross" is too critical, but certainly "the folk" preserved some and abandoned others according to their whims at the time.

Richard