PS - and would tell us if it's your own personal definition or whether others share it

I think, ultimately, we each of us have our own personal definition of folk music & song based on our own unique experience of it, and as those experiences change so must our personal definitions change, along with our expectations. We might find others who agree with us, but ultimately I feel that an absolute consensus will remain, thank God, elusive. With respect of defining folk song beyond the subjective, then I feel we must recognise that if 80%+ of what is being sung in the name of folk isn't folk song according to an orthodox reading of the 1954 Definition then something must be wrong somewhere.

But that wasn't my personal definition, Jim - rather that was me trying, and failing, to understand the objective consensus of what folk song was in terms of the collective experience of The Revival, where the reality of the thing must (and does) outweigh the theory. However attractive that theory might be, it in no way accounts for the experience of Folk Music & Song in 2009 - at least not according to the orthodoxy, as far as such an orthodoxy might actually be said to exist beyond the fevered imaginations of The Orthodox.

As I said elsewhere on this thread (or the other one) I see English Folk Music & Song as a bucolic fantasy existing on a similar level as railway modelling & medieval battle re-enactment with the only difference being that your average railway modeller would at least recognise a real train if they saw one & even the most hardened veteran of The Sealed Knot isn't going to complain if the government doesn't include them as part of our national defences. In other words, it is a form of eccentric escapism, pure and simple, but remains as serious as the lives & passions of those individuals, yourself included, who somehow manage keep it afloat. This, I feel, is activism enough, especially given the broader political & cultural issues at stake here - Nationalism, WAVism, the BNP, etc. etc. - all of which flock to folk like flies around shite.