I hope that GUEST, Catherine Foster will forgive me for hijacking her comments in the Peter Bellamy thread, in order to examine her theme here. To quote you, Catherine, you said:

... Shrewsbury FF is a FOLK FESTIVAL. It appeals to folkies and within those hallowed, insular walls each and every one of them can feel comforted that their mediocre tradition is safe in the hands of the even more mediocre Kerr, Fagan, Sartin, Hield, Kerfuffle, Causley etc. A more dull and less exciting, forward looking event would be hard to find.

You may want to bring up the Afro Celts. Christ so would I. More pretentious than Bellowhead (and that's saying something), but musically inferior.

It was folkie through and through with a capital F. What upsets me so much is that this is music that our entire nation should be celebrating and as long as we present it in this kind of way, Joe Public isn't going to sit up and take notice. No other nation would stand for their traditional music being treated as such.

Whenever I see comments like this in Mudcat or any other forum, I immediately think "beauty is in the ear of the listener". Whether you love or hate a band like Bellowhead (for example), your preference tells us more about you than it does about Bellowhead.

I find it interesting that you believe that the music of a "mediocre tradition" is "music that our entire nation should be celebrating". I've never believed, and never will, that the nation should be celebrating anything - particularly one genre of music. I've just had a thorough read of "The Imagined Village", as it happens, and the subverting of a musical genre - traditional song and dance in this case - to the differing "national" ideals of people like Sharp, Karpeles, Gardiner et al is definitely not to my taste.

The fact, whether you like it or not, is that traditional music - by which I mean tunes as well as songs - is strong enough and well enough as a recorded and documented body of music to withstand any periodic variations in performance, presentation, arrangement, interpretation, adaptation and augmentation. Decrying current trends in all these matters is to miss the point. The music exists in its own right, and no amount of proselytising for one trend or another will make a huge amount of difference, in our wired world, to its popularity or otherwise.

As it happens I almost never attend folk festivals, preferring on the whole to get my fix of traditional tunes from sessions which, because of the different people who attend, are each unique in flavour. However, it does seem rather pointless to belabour a folk festival because it appeals to "folkies" - whatever you mean by that word. I'd be interested to hear how you think traditional music should be presented, and what music you would include in the presentation. A difficult question to answer, I'm afraid, without starting up yet another tedious debate of the "what is folk music" type.

I should add that my personal musical tastes are extremely wide and that, as far as traditional music is concerned, I much prefer tunes to songs. Interestingly, the tune "canon", for want of a better word, has a much more fluid boundary than the song "canon". I recently picked up a book of fiddle tunes composed by the fiddler James Hill from the Bagpipe Museum in Morpeth - tunes arranged for small pipes keys, of course. The interesting word here is "composed". The tunes are either his tunes or ones that he was known for regularly playing - so a mixture of old and new. So I have no objection to the "canon" being added to.

I have to say, though, that after a quick listen to the Mumfords and Marling on Spotify, I'd rather have a couple of minutes of Elvis singing "Let's Play House", or Billy Briggs spitting his way through "Chew Tobacco Rag" than them. Which, of course, says more about me than the Mumfords and Marling...