With regard to trad versus recently-composed songs: Eliza had some very wise thoughts to offer about the value of traditional material. This doesn't mean that nothing recent has any value, but singer-songwriters who are in the music scene are capable of promoting their own songs. The traditional material no longer has a live composer around to help it along, and so it's more vulnerable.

It also seems to me that the folk process has preserved only the best of the tradtional songs. Songs with bad lyrics or a dull tune tend to get dropped from the repertoire, or else people adapt them by putting them to new tunes and pruning our the worst lyrics, perhaps adding new verses or fusing two versions to come up with one, better one.

Now, this doesn't happen so easily with new songs. Some of the songs that are newly-written are wonderful stuff which is quickly assimilated and passed on by lots of singers. But many more are either flawed or complete crap. The songwriter who carries these songs may not be able to distinguish between the good and the bad, and will continue to inflict third-rate material on the audience. And others will hesitate to alter material that is, either formally or implicitly, the intellectual property of the composer. There's a sort of natural selection process that applies itself to folk song, weeding out the weaker stuff, and the newer material hasn't been subjected to this. This doesn't make it all bad, but leaves a higher proportion of rubbish around than soome of us would wish.

When we look at the respected songwriters mentioned by Harvey, to some extent the selection process has already been at work on them. Countless other songwriters of the 60s and 70s have sunk without trace. And it's probably the case that even the successful people have written songs that are now, with good reason, forgotten. Forty years is a long time, even in folk music, and that's why the songs that survive from early in the revival are, on the whole, robust, memorable songs that are worth singing, just like the best of traditional songs.