I find most of this thread instructive and interesting, aside from the personal attacks which seem to be diminishing as posters warm to the topic at hand.

There is an evident lack of "shared language" for discussing this topic, but there is a wealth of experience to draw upon.

One performer of "folk songs" I found particularly interesting was Frank Warner, who collected the songs from primary sources in the Appalachian Mountains, upstate New York, and other rural areas of North America. Warner also recorded his own versions of many of these songs and made a deliberate effort to sing them in a similar (not identical) fashion to how the singers sang them. Some of his source singers were quite old and he certainly did not attempt to replicate their degraded voices, but the result providing a much wider range of singing than one would encounter by listening to the "contemporary folk singers" of the early 1960's. I was intrigued at the time and still find Warner's recordings valuable to return to as a reference point.

Charley Noble