Richard - I mean what I say: content rather than context, which is to say folk music is what folk music does, rather that what folk music is perceived to be doing by those who wish to define what remains ultimately indefinable.

As a somewhat dyed-in-the-wool Traddy myself (with all the weighty issues & morbid afflictions that generally involves) I nevertheless have absolutely no problem with people singing anything they want to sing as part of a singaround - pop, blues, opera, country, psyche, jazz, Dylan, Paxton, Lennon / McCartney, Purcell - because the content of what they sing is rather less important that the context in which they sing it & the contribution it makes to he overall experience. I might kill a singaround stone-dead with a studied rendering of The Tarves Rant, but the next singer will get us all roaring again with Laura Nyro's And When I Die.

In this way I'm happy to be a rank-and-file folkie, as I have been now for over thirty years, enjoying other rank-and-file folkies singing their hearts out in singarounds the world over. To me, it's an ideal of collective music making & a potent personal experience besides; an existential communion with what will always be strictly empirical and, therefore, all too ephemeral but generally rather dependable, or else I'm sure I would have lost faith long ago.

Why should we sing folk music at all?

They will echo onward down the years and never, ever fade,
For fifty thousand singing men will never be afraid
For to raise their lusty voices, their spirits to revive,
And tell to all eterni-tie, 'We're glad that we're alive.'

Or even...

When snow transforms the hedgerow thorn and frost engilds the berry
Good men and true the firelogs hew and in the inns make merry
When singing all as with one voice, it seems the very walls rejoice
And merriment about does spring, when all men sing.