Thank you John P for that "normal people playing music" test. How commonsensical. I hear that!

Personally, I choose to participate in "living traditions" in folk music, Western folk music, and I see cross-fertilisation happening all the time between cultures and sub-cultures, with interesting overlaps of tunes and songs. I am an unabashed musical chameleon, a shape-shifter, a musical slut, playing music in different subcultures, and I have to practice a lot just to keep my chops together. I won't elaborate, but it's something of an epicurean discipline for me, and I play just to keep my skills from eroding. I can never play enough, and I don't play enough, and I play all the time. Hahaha.

Okay, all living traditions operate in a continuum of continuity and change. One has a connection to the past, what earlier singers and players have done (gone through and suffered). One adds something of oneself, plays in the moment, zones into the music, "breaks the bread" with normal, haha, people.

To be honest, I don't think full-time musicians are "normal" folk. And what is a contemporary folk musician these days, anyway? Ugh!

At any rate, normality - what normal people do - may need to be sacrificed - it's that old myth of selling one's soul to the trickster-god at the crossroads - if one wants to *become music* - to do it as *lifestyle* - no turning back! And it's a long road that has no turning - far from a a normal routine. It's not for everybody, not for sane people, I reckon!

I reckon it must have been one "hard time" after the next for Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles, who had this to say about him: "Any display of singularity was displeasing to him; and he followed the convention in behavior as well as in appearance unless there was a very good reason for departing from them. 'It saves so much trouble,' he would say." - From Wikipedia

And here's something about his left-wing critics, who were also products of their time and peculiar social circumstances: Cecil Sharp from Wikipedia: During the post World War II "second" British folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, Sharp was occasionally chided for this by leftist critics such as Bert Lloyd. C. J. Bearman writes that "Lloyd was effectively the first to offer public criticism of Sharp and of the first revival generally. This critique was from a Marxist perspective: Lloyd (1908-82) had associated himself with the Communist Party since the 1930s. ... However, he was always more pragmatic than doctrinaire, and he combined criticism of Sharp's philosophy and methods with high and unreserved praise for his motivation and the epic scale of his achievement. Until the early 1970s, the prevailing view of Sharp was one of reverence or respect tinged with moderate criticism. This changed in the 1970s, when David Harker, a Cambridge post-graduate specialising in English literature, initiated a sustained attack on the motivations and methods of the first folk revival, singling out Cecil Sharp and accusing him of having manipulated his research for ideological reasons. These criticisms were quickly taken up by others who were doubtless in part motivated by an understandable reaction to the previous hagiographical treatment of Sharp.

I'm beginning to think that Cecil Sharp has been ganged up on unfairly, and it's essentially the pot calling the kettle black. His critics need to look in the mirror.

Sharp worked assiduously to collect material on both sides of the Atlantic, over decades, seeking out and preserving hard-to-find people, even before the material, being intimately involved in the revival of Morris Dancing down to the present day; in fact, his notations in manuscripts were used to teach the traditional dances; and he was a creative collaborator in folk-song, again, arranging and preserving scores of songs. He was no pocket-edition critic, he made real and lasting contributions. Give him a break!

It's so easy for critics (left or right) to smash statues of people, frozen icons - those mellifluous-word-wielding minions of the TMT - the Trad Music Taliban (more folk police). (Shut up and play!)

So, Sharp was most likely a "creative collaborator" in the folk tradition, who knew? That term was coined by Seán Ó Riada, an Irish composer who played harpsichord and organised the Ceoltóirí Chualann, who later morphed into The Chieftains.

Ó Riada stressed "sean-nós" (old style) songs, placing great emphasis on the individual singer, melody and its variations, what he called the "core of the tradition": This did not mean that he eschewed accompaniment; in fact, he was a composer who scored documentary films and whose orchestrations were built around tunes, starting with unharmonised monody, the single-melody line of the sean-nós singer.

Last, Ó Riada despised folk guitars, saxophones, and banjos, Stringsinger, so you get the last laugh - too funny!

"The lute was displaced by the harpsichord and now wants its revenge." - Stringsinger

This post is way too long, I'm sorry folks. I get carried away. Time to walk the husky! He loves it! Best ~ Tom