"Why would anyone refuse to see that there is a difference of type, not style, between a folk art and a contemporary one?

Because not all of us are suckered into the prescriptive fantasies of the Folksong Revival. The very notion of Folk Art is so much patronising paternalistic hokum - it exists to suppress & disempower the very essence of working-class creativity that gave rise to the old songs & ballads in the first place."

Well I think you're both getting too hung up on the urge to categorize and capitalize. It implies things are a lot more homogenous than they actually are: I prefer my Folk Revival uncapitalised, thanks, because Shirley Collins is not Bert Jansch, and Bert Jansch was not Ewan MacColl.

Similarly, while you can have arguments about whether something is "a difference of type, not style" in the abstract and in general, those kind of distinctions start to unravel in practice - when you start to think about specific musicians and what they do.

There are plenty of folk-scene musicians who play proper trad folk material, but do so in a way undistinguishable from singer-songwriter pop idioms. Change the words and they'd be David Gray or Coldplay or Ed Sheeran. Now is that a difference of "type" or "style? I don't know, and I think it's irrelevant: style is to type as quantity is to quality (as water is to steam).

Likewise, I think Sedayne gets equally hung up on speculating on what singers might *think* they are doing, rather than what they actually are doing. I've yet to encounter anyone on the folk scene who does in fact genuinely believe they are a 19th century farm labourer, or even merely the reincarnation of one.