I'm coming in late on this one but some of those who started the thrtead may live long enough to see the end of it. When I played in Cobbers, we tried not to get labelled as a folk band, bush band or any other type if we could. That's not to say that we didn't love our folk music, particularly the Australian stuff, but we didn't want to get tied down by prejudices that were around then over what was folk music and what wasn't. Basically, we wanted to entertain people and have fun. I'm talking 1968 on here but the attitude lasted thirty years. I was introduced to "folk music" by a friend's father's Peter Paul and Mary record and like Brucie's students, I liked it enough to look further.
Our attitude over the years got us into a lot of trouble. We were the first "folk" group to take a pa system into a Melbourne folk club but at the time, the clubs were moving from quiet coffee lounges into the pubs where halfway through the night the audience was drunk and noisy. It seemed logical to us. Later I saw many of the people who made a point of walking out at Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span concerts. Were they folk bands?
To get to the beginning of this thread, in 1977 we met Chris Barber and Vic Gibbons who were part of the group who ran the Reading Festival which in those days was Rock Blues Jazz and Folk. By the time we took up their invitation to play the festival in 1979, it had changed dramatically and was pure rock and mostly a punk crowd. One of the high ranking overseas bands was beer-canned and had to leave the stage. We played Aussie folk songs with banjos, fiddles and guitars and a "Drum kit" made of beer bottles nailed to a stick and we got an encore. Punk was about cutting the crap and though I never did really get into it, it fitted pretty well with how we saw things at the time. I loved the stuff the Pogues and Dubliners did together.
One other point, one song that always seems to get old folkies at almost any venue on board (and one of my favourites) was/is Creedence Clearwater's Lodi. Sang soft and slow, you'd swear it was a folk song. Sorry for the tirade. I need to take brevity lessons from Malcolm.