Jim,

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RN:"I think too much of this can detract from the actual process of making music"
JC:Totally disagree - quite apart from the fact that if somebody hadn't taken the time and trouble to 'documentat and research' we would not have had any folk songs to sing in the first place and it is the result of this that has ascertained that future generations will have the same opportunities we had to listen to and sing them. Some people want to do one thing, some the other, some of us want do do both - and do. Please don't separate these activities into opposites - they complement each other, not canncel each other out.
Unquote

I wasn't saying that documentation and research were unimportant. They obviously are. My point was that *only* concentrating on the past can give a skewed viewpoint of what's going on in the present.

And:
JC: "One of the effects of 'progress' is that songs now emerge into the world stillborn - they belong to the author and come with a name attached and a little (c).
The folk club isn't a community and folkies aren't 'the folk'. "

I appreciate that the clubs aren't "the folk". But my point was that *society* has evolved, to the point, in England at least, where there *aren't* local communities, or homogenous groups in an area largely engaged in the same trades. What constitutes a "folk" song therefore has to evolve to accommodate this change. And there are still songs that appear and propagate without the (c).