but that's exactly what I call a singing tradition, a concept you don't accept.

Any tradition is but the consequence of the individuals involved with it; The Tradition is consequent on the creativity of those individuals in making and changing the music and songs. As far as it can be said to have existed it all, it did so in a fluid state consequent on the people who did it - same with any music. The bit I don't accept is the Folklore thing, which has people as a passive medium for something they have no undertstanding of simply because it was subjected to a xeno-methodology by way of taxidermy and taxonomy. It is is this secondary stage that not only defines and perceives The Tradition, but later insists upon both it, and it's purity. We can see any artist as an indivual or part of a causal tradition, be it in terms of their roots, or the effect they had, if any, on later artists. Take John Coltrane, from his early work through to the wunderkind of the first classic Miles Davis quintet, through to the classic quartet and his later explorations with Rashied Ali and Pharoah Sanders - none of that came of nowhere, and yet he rewrote the book for every saxophonist that came after him. A few of us might mutter that he ripped most of it from John Gilmore, who was mostly content to stay in the ranks of the Sun Ra Arkstra - and then we go on to subject Gilmore's art to a similar analysis. Piece by piece, we build up a comprehensive picture of The Jazz Tradition, even though in doing so we end up with an archive so vast we'll never get through it it in a lifetime, much less reach any sort of concensus on what really happened and why - or any sort of understanding of what it must have been like to be there!

The Folk Tradition is likewise vast and complex; we access it through songs and singers and sources, but its nebulosity defies absolute understanding without serious affecting its true worth. The closer we get to it, so the bigger and more wondrous it gets, but that closeness is only in terms of individual human beings who are so much more than just a part of it, but, as I say, creative artists on a par with any. I'm not suggesting they were all far-out restructuralists, but the evidence would suggest that they weren't content to leave things alone. No one controls the movement of any given song from one singer to a next, much less how that singer then chooses to make the song their own, or then change it with each subsequent performance. As I suggested elsewhere, even if we had a crack team of time-travelling musicologists to record every single utterance of every single song sung by every single singer and then subjected the data to a programme of high powered meta-analysis I'm sure we'd still be missing something - the pure joy of thing probably!

I love cultural process, just times you can't see the trees for the wood, but there is a beauty in a swarm too, and in ever-changing organic fractals. My main problem with The Traditional Hypothesis is when it becomes the basis for pure-blood correctness, elitism and exclusion which, I think, is a complete anathema to the nature of The Folk Beast which has always been about individuals doing things as it suited them. If it wasn't, then I'm sure there'd only be the one version of Barbara Allan, and so-called Folk Art would look bland and mass produced.

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Loved your Colliers Rant, mind.

Cheers. It's odd that we only have one set of words for it, although there are other verses that would fit. Some years ago my mate Clive Powell set Ca the Horse, Me Marra to an old pipe tune, but those would fit Colliers too - and could well be contemporary. I sing Ca' the Horse to Clive's tune, but think nothing of altering the odd line here and there (I've lately started to sing he digs his coals thick, me lads - and drives the lasses wild; the original is drives the boards wide; I'm sure you can see how I got there!). With Collier's, I wouldn't consciously change a word of it; it comes from my grandfather's old copy of Crawhall's Newcassel Sangs, 1888, which reprints Bell from 1818. Is that the earliest?? I take heart that coal was the main export of the Tyne right back in the late middle-ages, so The Colliers Rant becomes a seance with a potent non-corporeal something or other which these days you might find rusting away in some old ditch-back or other, but even in my recently young day defined the steaming long-vanished landscapes which were once my home.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsqsWmNqWYU

Sair fyeld, hinny!