So someone with an actual name who exists within living memory is responsible for the sentimentalised excrescence that is 'The Fields of Athenry'? Jeez...

Nothing to do with definitions of folk (which is largely a game for academics and pseudo-academics and "says nothing to me about my life", to quote a quotable non-folksinger) but is not the test of any song first and foremost whether it moves you, touches you, sends you, with the tedious and thankless task of classification, dessication and pinning onto a board under glass an altogether secondary pleasure? Once taken out of the halls of academia, it not a form of intellectual frottage for the sole satisfaction of those who are not content with pleasuring themselves only with the beauty of the sound in the moment? On some level I'm probably glad that the folk world is awash with self-appointed sorters-outers of the wheat from the chaff (once they've reached agreement on the definitions of what is wheat and what indeed is chaff) but isn't it the musical equivalent of smeary, oversized, sellotaped-up, eighties-style, pale brown tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses? The sort that keep slipping endlessly down the wearer's nose? Until a groove is worn?

I suppose defining increasingly makes me lose the will to live. It doesn't increase my listening pleasure or help me decide what I should listen to.

Finally, good to hear from you Glueman. Your pithy and usually spot-on interjections have been missed. Funny how when you like traditional music but you don't subscribe to the theoretical orthodoxy you're suddenly a 'horse whisperer' or whatever the put-down of the moment is...