What about Hissyfit and Linda Kelly? They seem to be playing a lot of Folk festivals and venues. Again these misguided people who arrange and book these things seem to be getting it terribly wrong.

Are Linda Kelly's songs folk? Northern Tide or Sweet Minerva for example. By those who are stuck with trying to return to a definition that coincidentally is contemporaneous with my birth (perhaps someone did it out of spite when they heard I was on the way) this is not folk. It's unaccompanied; it has structure and content; it is rooted in community and a way of life; it talks of feelings and truths etc etc and it sounds like folk but apparently it isn't.

So if the word 'folk' has a place in explaining what sort of music to expect (or avoid) and is related to the content and the sound of the music how does it help me to know what Hissyfit are like when they are expressly excluded from the definition? Is it a bit like 'I Can't Believe it's not Butter'? Should we have an 'I Can't Believe it's not Folk' category - then people would know what it almost is? What point does it serve?

'Pop' music has changed in meaning over time as many of the types of music that form a subset of the whole did not exist then - though they had their roots back then. Would you have had Oasis without the Beatles or a lot of Indie music without the Sex Pistols?

'Jazz' seems to have managed too and probably is hugely more diverse than any of the other ones.

Surely 'folk' in common parlance is an umbrella term that has a much wider definition than the narrow 1954 one in the same way that 'jazz' is not just a specific southern US style of music as played in the early 20th century (or perhaps it is - oh god another group of purists offended)? Within that umbrella lies that particular genre that a lot of people cherish greatly and would dearly love to reclaim the word so that it refers to what it used to and what they believe it should refer to. The problem is you can't reclaim it because it's gone too far in the public consciousness to get it back. You can't remove the connotations of the word now and cleanse it anymore than the happy, frolicking Elizabethan chaps can have 'gay blade' back again to it's original meaning.