Why shouldn't they be ours????? Because they made the fecking things! They are theirs! The Revival treats such works as fair booty by removing them from their initial social context and making them into mere folk music by isolating them from the folk that made them. I listen to recordings of old travellers and I know I'm in the presence of something truly numinous; the real thing as it were. Hell, I've even stopped singing things like McGinties Meal an' Ale after immersing myself in a night of Davie Stewart a couple of years back & concluded that I was not worthy. Listening to the old singers goes beyond mere taste - it's to experience something truly lost to us in terms of the human aesthetic, replaced in Folk Music by increasing MOR sensitivities and prissy slick muso blandness. I know singers who think of the old singers as a source for songs for their own repertoire, but this is wrong, surely? At least it is to miss something utterly crucial in the original performances which even you are all too ready to dismiss as being of secondary importance to the songs, which you so glibly claim as your own.

That's what I mean by paternalistic collectors only interested in people as passive song carriers by the way - it's a lot easier than understanding them as an art-form integral to their cultural context.

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By the way, I never got your reply on why you, who has rejected research, should be right and a century of study should be as wrong as you claim they are - did I miss something?

I favour experience over research; I take as I find. For sure my bookshelves are heavy with tomes on Folksong, from Sharp to Roud, but precious few of them (such as Alison MacMorland's book on Willie Scott Heard Laddie o' the Glen) make any attempt to get to grips with the life, times, culture, genius of the singer and their repertoire. That's the essence of it for me. Willie Scott's songs are no more ours than the solos of John Coltrane. Both are integral to the essence and genius of an individual master without whom they are meaningless. It's like trying to appreciate Ian Curtis by listening to the busker knocking out Joy Division songs on Corporation Street. There is the reality, there is the annotating and archiving, there is the taxidermy, the taxonomy & the sorry sick reek of formaldehyde, then there are the Parlour Arrangements, by which point all reality has been lost. And I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else! A few years back I performed Willie Scott's Kielder Hunt and one punter told me my version was definitive. I felt sick to the gut and went away and recorded THIS in an attempt to feed something of my own life and times back into the song : not Folk, but feral experimental music arising from a lifetime of one sorry punk relating to Traditional Song and their singers as an integral aspect of my culture.

Did you miss something, old man? Times it looks like you missed the nose on your own face.