I suppose it helps to know a bit of the history of the Digital Tradition. You'll find the full story here. In the beginning, Dick Greenhaus took lyrics from notebooks collected by Susan Friedman and Dennis Cook. As time went by, other singers contributed their favorites, and the database grew. It came to be accepted as a worthwhile source of lyrics for folk musicians, people who expected songs to be "folk-processed" by the people who sang the songs. It was not intended to be a scholarly work - it was just a collection of lyrics for people who like to sing folk songs.

A few copyrighted songs, and even some non-folk songs, appear in the database - most probably, because somebody liked to sing the song enough to think it should be submitted to the database. Dick tries to get songwriter attribution correct, and he's the one that asked me to set up a Songwriter attribution PermaThread. Note that the PermaThread was started in July, 2002, long after the database had been sent to our programmer Mark Heiman.

From its beginning in 1988, the Digital Tradition was a DOS program. Trouble is, very few people do DOS any more. Mark Heiman had developed a Mac version, and has spent the past few years on a Windows version. There was a Beta Windows version that came out more than a year ago. It worked fine on Dick and Susan's computers, but it kept causing my computer to do weird things. I think the current version solves most of those technical problems, and now we can get back to the job of refining the database.

The Digital Tradition is primarily a collection of lyrics. I've started the DTStudy threads as a supplement to the Digital Tradition, to allow people to provide research information. The threads seem to be coming along very well. As time goes on, I'd like to see us embark on a systematic review of all 8981 songs in the Digital Tradition. I expect that will take a bit of time, and you probably will note all sorts of lingering uncorrected mistakes in the next edition of the Digital Tradition.

If you like, you can look at the Digital Tradition and say it's a piece of shit. If that's what you think, you're free to build a better mousetrap on your own. I don't think it is - it's a wonderful thing that's continually being refined. They have programming help from Mark Heiman and a little bit of help from volunteer harvesters; but Dick and Susan do all of the editing of the database, and I think they do a darn good job.

-Joe Offer-