Apropos especially of Joe O's and George S's comments above, here's an excerpt from a longer posting I just added to the "Ashokan Farewell" thread, having just read all the previous ones there as well as here:

For what it's worth, I've heard Jay Ungar say that he had the tune (Ash.F.) running around in his head, and that it has similarities to other tunes that he'd been playing in similar idiom; so it's no wonder that it sounds like an old trad. tune. I believe he's also said that his creative imagination may have put the tune together [or maybe it put itself together in his creative ear] from bits of other, similar old-style waltzes running around in his head from his immersion in traditional music, but didn't lift the tune itself. (My paraphrase of his thought as I understood it.)

I'm sure he composed it himself -- the collective unconscious/subconscious ear is a powerful directing force when a musician doodles around a lot on his/her accustomed instrument in a particular familiar genre (it's part of the _play_ in "playing"), steeping like tea, seeping like -- oops, I'm getting tangled in a metaphor/simile swamp -- anyway, it's easy to think while doodling that one is coming up with a new tune and then later realize that it feels SO RIGHT! so resonant, because it's really _almost_ that other tune you loved so well, or contains partial phrases thereof that grab you and won't leave you alone.

In any case, Ash.F. is a gorgeous tune, one that can endure on its own and become part of the trad. body of Celtic-Anglo-Amer. music, as is happening quickly in this case...

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And then there are cases like the original songs composed by Jean Ritchie (e.g., Blue Diamond Mines," under the name of Than Hall) in the idiom of the Kentucky mountain tradition that she grew up in, altho she wrote them after she had become part of the more urban, more self-aware folk-revival world that most all of us here now discussing cats inhabit and debate about.

Someone sings about the things with which she/he identifies, issues of personal and cultural concern, humor, etc., in her/his culture, in the style(s) available within that culture. At what point is it considered "traditional" or "non-trad.," when our various inherited smaller-group traditions become more widely accessible and begin to intermingle increasingly, as they've been doing for this last half of 20th century?

These discussions about "What is traditional, and where are the boundary lines, and what fits exactly where, and who can be considered The Genuine Folk, and if it sounds/looks like the real thing is it really the real thing, or close enough for acceptance even if it was acquired from the outside rather than the inside," etc., have been going on for at least the last 40 years that I know of, and probably longer. (In the folk-art field for over 60 years that I've read about.) I used to feel more purist about the questions and definitions than I do now. Maybe my thinking has degenerated, or has it evolved? (If it quacks like a duck but isn't a duck will the other ducks consider it duck-like enough to quack back?)

(But Buddy Holly filtered thru Steeleye Span a la the Watersons/Young-Tradition of 20 yrs. ago -- whose tradition would this be a traditional representation of? The modern all-of-us? Or the kind of crossover that's in the direction of Kiri Te Kanawa singing "Good Night Irene"? (Or Marion Anderson or Paul Robeson singing black spiritual songs from their own cultural traditions but in white concertization style rather than in black family-community style?)