Sorry about my rather 'fuzzy' (is that the right word?) joke, Jim.   What I was trying to imply was that because I forgot that I had started this thread (i.e. the author), and years later people are still discussing it, maybe it's entered the 'oral tradition'....and now this thread meets at least some of the criteria of traditional.   Yeah....I know.   Not really all that funny..

But onto the discussion: I have a lot of respect for Jim Carroll's point of view here.   I think that any genre of music has to have some kind of defining features.   I also think that it's always valuable to keep discussing them, as you see how defining features change over the years.

For the longest time I was always fighting with the use of the word "cover version".....since I knew it's origin.   And the fact that now it's used to describe any song anybody sings that the singer didn't write (or wasn't written specifically for that singer)......drove me crazy. Now I just find it irritating, and I no longer go off on long discourses.

So I have to accept that the term has changed.

Maybe that's happened with 'folk music'.

But I haven't really heard any compelling arguments within this thread to suggest that 'traditional' as a category is really any different today than it ever was.

I think "Happy Birthday" and "Old MacDonald had a Farm" are traditional. So are those ballads that Jim and other folklorists have collected and annotated.

Eleanor Rigby?   Everybody knows it's a Beatles song.   Six Days on the Road?   Lots of variants, it's true.....but most people think of one specific recording (whether it's Dave Dudley or Taj Mahal or Colleen Peterson) when they hear or sing it.

Anyway.......I really don't know much about traditional music, but those are my thoughts.   For now, anyway (until they change....but then, that's part of the 'tradition').