Tom and all,
First an unreserved apology, then an explanation.
If I have offended anybody with my arguments and how I have delivered them – sorry, that was not my intention. Twenty-odd years ago I would have sat on my hands and kept silent; that's what I did in those days and that's what I don't do any more; don't really have that time now.
In the early sixties I found a music which sucked me in and more or less took over my life; I didn't know much about it, just that it was different and that I liked it. It was never a 'head' thing - in those days it came from Jeannie Robertson and Harry Cox and Joe Heaney and The Stewarts.... and many more who I was lucky enough to see and hear in the flesh, and in some cases, get to talk to.
Right through the sixties and seventies I attended clubs, I sang at them, helped run them, even helped set some of them up; they became a large part of my life when I wasn't working. I read a little about the music, but not much; I was far more interested in listening to it.
In the early seventies my wife and I began collecting; going out and finding the people who sang the songs I was interested in, whose parents had sung them and whose parents' parents had probably sung them. We met them, recorded their songs and, far more importantly, we talked to them – in many cases at great length.
We met Travellers who had worked in tinware, dealt in horses, built and travelled in horse drawn caravans and had done a host of other jobs and had led lives completely alien to our own. They took us in, made us welcome and sang for us – and talked, and talked, and talked - filling several hundred tapes with songs, stories, reminiscences and information.
Shortly after that we visited this town on the west coast of Ireland and met small farmers, landless labourers, council employees who worked on the road, singers, musicians, storytellers, tradition bearers...
We went to the town/village a few miles down the coast from here and met fishermen who where then still going out to sea in three and four-man canvas boats and whose parents had gone out in the same type of boat earlier in the century and rescued the crew of a French sailing ship which had gone aground in bad weather. They told us of the incident, and sang us the songs that had been made about it. Again we were made welcome, and again these people filled another several hundred tapes with their songs, stories and information.
We went to the East coast of England and met a carpenter from farming stock who sang us wonderful songs and spent the next twenty years filling tape after tape with information about the singing of those songs and with his very strong and thoughtful ideas of how they came about and how they should be treated.
We met East Anglian deep sea fishermen, Scots Travellers, Irish men and women, mainly from rural backgrounds; singers, storytellers, musicians and dancers who had all ended up in London.
We finally moved over here to the West of Ireland and are now in the process of trying to make sense of what we've been given and trying to work out how to make it available to as many people as might be interested in it.
We haven't gone to the books for our information; we've relied largely on the people I've mentioned and on others we've met with a similar interests to our own. The books, or at least some of them, have been a seasoning rather than the main meal; the ball of string that helps us try to find our way through the labyrinth.
All this is a little long winded – sorry for that – it's an attempt to explain who and why I am. In some ways my desire to debate is a repayment of the debt of gratitude to the people who have been generous and patient enough to pass on to us what we have been bequeathed; if you like, a recognition of the responsibility that seems to go with the territory.
I enjoy these discussions/debates/arguments – whatever they are; I find them educational, stimulating, entertaining: I don't particularly like it when they become too heated, but it seems to be an inevitable part of them and it's certainly a two-way street. I didn't start this thread; I didn't call it 'Folk vs Folk'. I regard discussions like this as little more than marking out our own territory, I never understand why people should take them as questions of value judgements – they're not. Why should I object to what other people listen to; my own musical tastes are fairly catholic.   
Just occasionally some of the arguments strike a raw nerve in me.
I was born and grew up in Liverpool, a city I was quite fond of at one time. In the mid-sixties I watched my home town being turned into a gigantic money-making machine by a cynical and highly-manipulative music industry. When I am told that one of the products of that machine is part of the music I have been listening to and recording over the last forty years...... well - sorry for the knee-jerk reaction.
I don't suppose these arguments ever change peoples' minds – speaking for myself, they give me a great deal to think about, I hope they do the same for others. I am, of course, unconvinced by most of the arguments put forward; too vague, too unsubstantial, a little like trying to wrestle fog.
One point I remain absolutely unconvinced on is the idea that the term 'folk' has changed because millions of people now take it to mean something else. One of the great failures of all of us has been our inability to bring people to our music – however we care to define it. We are, and probably will remain a tiny Freemasons Lodge with our own customs and language; these arguments are little more than a heated family discussion over the tea and toast – not the way I hoped it would turn out, but that's the way it seems to be. It's really up to us to sort out our differences; the outside world neither knows nor cares what we are about.
There is still much to be said on the subject of 'folk'.
Steve if you wish to believe that we still have a living tradition and that the Victorian and Music Hall songs are part of it, of course you are very welcome to do so.
I believe the tradition died when people stopped making and adapting songs and became recipients of rather than participants in their culture. I also believe Pat and I witnessed part of that dying in the mid-seventies when the Travellers got portable televisions and stopped singing (except to pests with tape recorders).
My late friend and neighbour Tom Munnelly, one of the greatest folk song collectors in these islands with 22,000 songs under his belt, as far back as the early 70s described his work as "a race with the undertaker". His field-work finally dried up altogether in the mid-nineties.
.............. but perhaps that's an argument for another time.
Jim Carroll