MGM:

Similarly with clubs. Some will adopt strict policies admitting only songs from well within the folk side of the boundary; others will be more flexible as to which they will admit from within this wide, not entirely defined border. And a few may be what I often heard Peter Bellamy denounce as "that's not a not folk club, it's an anything club".   


How Purist Is Your Club? The Rose Scale

How many of these songs would be acceptable in your club? (If you don't run a club, how many of these songs would you be willing to hear on a regular basis before you wanted to stop going?)

0. None of the below; none of them are genuine traditional songs.
1. Rosebud in June
2. Blood-Red Roses
3. Rose of Allendale
4. Little Yellow Roses
5. Rose in April (Kate Rusby)
6. English Rose (Paul Weller)
7. Roses of Picardy
8. "Roses of Chorlton Green, a song I wrote this afternoon"
9. All of the above and more; anything and everything is acceptable in any folk club I go to.

Explanatory notes
1. An old show tune. (A very old show tune, admittedly.)
2. A lesser-known Bertsong; Lloyd seems to have got hold of a shanty called 'Bunch of Roses' and made it a bit more dramatic.
3. An old parlour song (with a known author) which was adopted by Revival singers (Corries, Nic Jones et al).
4. A song recorded by Adam Faith(!) and written by Trevor Peacock(!!) which escaped into the wild to the extent of being adopted by Forest Schools Camps; subsequently recorded by Fay Hield, Jon Boden et al.
5. A contemporary song which is trying to sound traditional.
6. A contemporary song which uses phrases like 'seven seas' and is accompanied on an acoustic guitar.
7. A 20th-century music-hall number recorded by Perry Como, Old Blue Eyes et al. (Al was a busy lad.)
8. I have not written a song called "Roses of Chorlton Green". (I have written a few songs, just none with roses in the title.)

I'll be honest, I would like to go to a club that stopped at 2. - one whose regulars were so purist that they'd point out that Blood-Red Roses is one of Bert's, and drum their fingers & cough if somebody did Rose of Allendale. My trad repertoire is what matters to me as a singer, and I'd welcome the chance to dig into it and develop it. In reality, though, I've never known a club that didn't go as far as 4. or 5., and most of them in my experience go right to 8. They're are PB's 'anything clubs', in other words, and by and large they celebrate it - perhaps taking the view that the 'folk' quality resides in the amateurism, the lack of amplification, the participation, or just about anything other than the actual material.

This also answers Lighter's point:

nothing prevents one from concentrating their interest either on 1954-style songs or on current rap lyrics if that's the brand of "folksong" they prefer.

And nothing prevents me from going to any folk club and doing a set consisting entirely of songs that have verifiably been modified during oral transmission; when I first got the trad bug I assumed that was what I would do. But then you go to a club where everyone's doing pop songs or new material, making you feel like an archaelogy lecturer who's crashed a coffee morning; or a club where traditional songs are de rigueur the first time round, after which everyone relaxes and does whatever they feel like (which usually isn't traditional); or a club where half the material's traditional, but it's the other half that gets the big applause... and it wears you down. The clubs don't actually stop anyone being a traditional purist, but they don't encourage it, either. I wish there were more clubs that would.