Okay, Pip - try this. You yourself are a passionate exponent of Traditional Folk Song who seeks (as many of us do) to use the Old Songs as a means of breathing life into another level of musical creativity - as oppose to the usual revival conceit of claiming to breathe life into the old songs which I regard as palpable nonsense. My point here is that all compositional process emerges from such idiosyncratic continuities - even the remaking of a Traditional Song in a Traditional Context is essentially an act of individual musical creativity as each performance is a unique event based upon what went before it, but in any case different. Things will, and must, vary; and in time, those micro variations will lead to macro variations; just as in time human eyes have evolved to gaze upon peacock tail feathers and ponder intelligent design.

The crucial thing here is what went before it - the tradition of the idiom, which in classical music will include as many masterclasses on The Goldberg Variations as musicological lectures on where they came from in the overall scheme of musical continuity. I've heard it suggested that Bach could have improvised The Goldberg Variations, and that what we have today is a written record of an essentially improvised musical process. After all there's nothing in TGV quite as astonishing as (say) Art Tatum playing the Tiger Rag or Dollar Brand's African Piano album on ECM.   

A lot of this is down to attitude. In oral popular culture things are going to be more obviously different to how they are in a literate culture of entrenched idealised correctness. Much of the Modernism of the 20th century reacts against the stuffy conversatism of such 'tradition' - even The Folk Revival itself might be said to be part of that radical reappraisal of what constitutes culture. Cecil Sharp was, after all, a radical; and many may raise an eyebrow when one speaks of the Modernist Approach to Mediaeval Music but in the work of (say) Rene Clemencic we see exactly that. Sadly, it's the Ren. Fair Re-enactment approach to Medieval Music that prevails, and a similar stuffy conservatism exists in the Folk World though not with the Traddies, rather the Big Al Whittles of this world, insisting the common-minded volkish reactionary self-evident correctness of The Mob (if I read his stance correct). Traddies are refined and noble radicals by default; theirs is a revolutionary perspective that believes the potentials of Traditional Folk Song may reinspire a culture grown moribund by its own endless replication. From what I've read, I think that's what Sharp might have had in mind too, however paternalistic his approach, but I've no doubt whatsoever that his heart was in the right place.

For what it's worth, I myself came to an appreciation of Traditional Folk Song via a passion for Ethnomusicology which was itself integral to the Experimental / Free Improv culture of the time which I got into via the more radical Prog bands like Gong, Henry Cow and the Third Ear Band. I'm glad I bypassed Folk in its post-modern post-Dynan hot-pot sense and I honestly can't see how the two things can possibly co-exist in Folk Clubs; I find it baffling, distressing and ultimately depressing as hell. But that's personal. I'm big on change, process and evolution; the irony is that all is change, process and evolution - even culture at its most conservative and reactionary is subject to change, process and evolution, though sometimes in the Folk World I might have my doubts...

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As for The Streets of London, it's one of the persistent spectres of 20th century MOR popular music - ubiquitous indeed; a radical sentiment couched in a cosy twee comfort blanket & equally as nauseating as his Hiring Fair on all sorts of levels but who's to say which version posterity will choose as definitive? If any? To any one of the 10,000 common or garden folk singers who sing it in any given Folk Week, it exists as a perfect idyll of radical righteous romance and self-delusion, comforting as a mantra or Rosary prayer; a medium for a very particular sort of seance. And remember, it will always be the first time for someone, just as it will always be the last...

S O'P (Looking out upon blue skies this morning & wishing he had a gun to go out with...)