There are a number of music posters who militate against the ethos of the site in that they assert that folk music does not exist.

The existence of Folk Music / Folklore depends on whether or not one accepts the prescriptions of the 1954 Definition which are born of a more right-wing way of looking at Popular Culture than left. In other words, it is supremely ironic that such Folkish notions come from the same ultra right-wing 'top-down policies' that the (admittedly mostly middle-class) Folk Scene has such an objection to.

In any case, denying the existence of the very feudal / bourgeois concept of 'Folk Music' is not the same thing as saying the old songs or the singers thereof didn't exist. Rather, it questions the overall patronising gloss of the Folk Revival whereby this essentially working-class material was harvested by the more romantically inclined members of the bourgeoisie intent upon the survival of the songs whilst disregarding the culture that created them in the first place.

My interest is in the Old Songs, Ballads and the Makers & Singers Thereof, rather than the subsequent taxidermy & taxonomy of the revival as such, for which I have much respect but reserve the right to question in the light of such books as (say) Fake Song and The Imagined Village which tell it like it was. As a bona-fide-working-class-anarcho-socialist-neo-Gnostic-Marxist-free-improvising-medievalist-who-sings-old-folk-songs-from-old-folk-sources I am too aware of the cultural contradictions, and would hope I'm not alone in such a viewpoint, but wouldn't be overly bothered if I was.

At the end of the day it's all a matter of personal opinion, passion and experience rather than anything too absolute...