It's interesting to reflect that had the songwriters & makers of yore had the capacity to be so savvy regarding copyright & royalties, there would have been no Folk Process, much less Traditional Songs to plunder to our heart's content today. But in a context of Oral Transmission where the only recording equipment available was the Human Brain, things invariably went astray rather, as the collected evidence would suggest, though just how random any of this was I wpouldn't like to say - in fact I would, because I don't think it was any more random than what goes on in Popular & Traditional Idioms today.

Sorry about this, just someone was bleating on recently about how songwriters are writing the folk songs of tomorrow, which struck me as a tad witless given that as far as Living Process is concerned your Idiomatic Folk Song is as dead as the fecking Dodo despite the best efforts of The Revival which remains a world unto itself...

Folk - Process or Genre? You decide!

Anyway, keep up the sterling work, Dick - and hopefully we'll be seeing Charley at The Steamer in Fleetwood in a month or two - or is it three? Ron was on about it the other day but I forget when he said it was...