Funny, but when I scanned the thread titles I realized the What is root beer? thread reminded me of this one. If you have the plants and shrubs growing on your property that you can dig up to make root beer from "scratch", I guess you have traditional root beer. I have to buy a bottled extract of real and artificial flavorings if I want to make root beer. It's the same with the songs and tunes I've learned. I have to buy recordings or song books to learn them, or in the rare case meet someone who teaches me a song or tune.

Even though I've tried to find music that may have come from my ancestor's home, there is no way for me to know for sure that it was the specific music my family knew. Since my relatives didn't hand on the traditional music directly to me, I have to find it "artificially". So I've always seen the Traditional Musician term in the way Sandy described it. I am influenced by traditional music, but I'd never claim to be a traditional singer. Few people making music today in the the US are being born into families and communities that are passing on the oral tradition of folk music that came directly through ancestors. The closest I have is my grandparents on my mother's side playing Soldier's Joy and Money Musk on the fiddle and my mother and uncle remembering the tunes and playing them. Few today are like Jean Ritchie's family and others like them who have a treasure house of preserved music to pass on to the younger relatives. There are a few people recognized by the Old Time fiddle gatherings in this region who come from the generation that learned music passed down by family and friends. Most others here today are learning music from commercial recordings. I think that is why I was so glad to find the old tapes on Ulstersongs that were recorded in people's homes in Ireland, complete with comments in between the songs, because it was the closest I could get to learning it directly from traditional musicians.

Alice