I've avoided this thread for a few days, and just now read just the stuff from the last 2-3 days.

Looks like the topic has changed from "Why should we sing it (folk music)?" to "What exactly is it?" For the umpteenth time, of course, but that's OK.

Must be OK ~ seems to be what lots of folks want to discuss.

Among contemporary songwriters, including "singer-songwriters" as well as non-performing composers, some individuals work in a traditional-folk-music-like style while most others do not. Those whose works arouse such consternation hereabouts are not the rockers or the musical-theater types, they are the folk-ish (usually acoustic-intrumentalist) types.

Songs that will survive another century or so (and thus become "folk") will probably include at least as many "commercially" written songs from our era (Beatles songs, certainly, movie music like "Over the Rainbow," etc.) as songs that we now consider borderline-folk.

In other words, music that we do not now think of as "folk" will become the ancient/traditional folk music of the future, while other current-day work that may claim "folk" status will be forgotten. The proof will be in the pudding, and the songs of our era that survive as "folk" will be the best ones ~ NOT just the ones that we currently wonder whether or not to define as "folk music."

Among current-day songwriters who may or may not "qualify" as folk artists to contemporaray observers are Robert Hunter and the late Jerry Garcia. Jerry was, of course, the world-famous electric-guitar virtuoso and bandleader of the Grateful Dead, and Robert (who is still very much alive) was his lyric-writing partner.

Both have always been serious scholars of all Anglo-American folk music traditions, and Hunter's lyrics, especially, show a tremendously effective effort to utilize folk traditions by recycling/repeating motifs and phrases from the traditional folk "canon." The songs gain a great deal of resonance thanks to this deep involvement in songwriting traditions.

Because their songs were, almost without exception, first performed by a rock ensemble featuring electrically amplified instruments, the Hunter/Garcia catalog is almost never included in discussions of "contemporary folk." However, I would wager that quite a few of their works will survive for a century or more, and many listeners will assume that they were not written in the 20th century for a rock band, but that they share the more ancient provenance of much older songs that traveled across the Atlantic several hundred years earlier.

I realize that many of you are well aware of the Dead and of their members' folk/bluegrass/jug-band histories, and also that many others among you never listened to them and automatically dismiss them as a musically unworthy throwback to a brief and dead era. Perhaps the doubters among you might be interested in reconsidering; that's what Google is for. If you're really interested and have a few bucks to spare, there is a great hardback book entitled "Annotated Lyrics of the Grateful Dead" that you might find very interesting.