middle class, informed, contemplative, argumentative people on here don't believe community folk singing goes on anymore because those people may have been exposed to viruses like education, the movies, rock and roll and the TV news and so the noble savage has been infected by choice and cannot be folk.

That's quite something, glueman - to wildly misrepresent an argument that was set out in great detail less than twelve hours (or comments) ago. But I guess it makes the argument easier for you to win - and that's the main thing, eh?

I'm not folk but only miss out by a generation (there are over 90 years between my son and his grandfather) and there are people around who still qualify.

Well, Jim Carroll thinks otherwise. Between a guy who dedicated large chunks of his life to looking for folksong in the wild and some guy who posts anonymously on the Internet - well, it's hard to know who to believe, isn't it? In any case, I don't think it's beyond the bounds of possibility that there are people around (in Britain) who still qualify - that's one more argument that I never actually made. But I think it's very, very unlikely.