At the risk of being belittled by those (him?) claiming their (his?) point is the definitive one on the basis of they (he?) used to own a tape recorder.....

The good Mr Padgett started a thread about traditional SINGER and it has (here's my word of the week) transmogrified into traditional SONG.

In the Rolling Stones tradition, "It's the singer, not the song."

Nobody is making sweeping anything about the person Ewan MCColl, but the product Ewan McColl is fair game. An excellent example of folk being what he decided it was. Mind you, penning such beautiful songs, he had at least as much right as anybody else to try to define things. I recall when I interviewed him that he kept rattling on about people only singing what is indigenous to them. A bit rich really. A Salford lad called Jim affecting a Scottish name and singing in a Scottish accent that may have worked, but there again, so did Dick Van Dyke's English accent, if you happened to be American. it is called playing to the crowd.

Just two things to throw in;

Mistaken words.. I used to sometimes end the night with a bit of music hall, and in particular Pomona. Pomona is a song about The Pomona Palace, in Albert Square, near Pomona Docks, in Salford. (McColl could have sung an indigenous song there if he had thought on...)

I used to be bemused by people correcting me and calling it Lamona.

The other thing to note is that my definition is not all embracing, (see above if you must, not going to bore all & sundry by repeating it..) but I have yet to read a definition that I could be happy with from others either. Hence, I reckon this is a circular thread, in that you can't define subjective terms.

A local club to me has a tape recorder "collecting" songs. The owner must be happy, as he seems to collect Paul Simon songs on it most nights.