My original notion a couple of months back (see HERE) was for a thread entitled Does Folk Music Exist? Despite Glueman's encouragement in this matter I was feeling understandably frail after the epic struggle that was 1954 and All That and thought I'd let things settle before giving the matter further thought. In this way I subsequently forgot all about it until Glueman opened this one which, as I have stated above, has confounded my every expectation.

I note that back on the 8th of May I used the phrase Cultural Liminality with respect of Folk, and as I sit here trying to shake off my Sunday morning hangover an image forms of Folk as a spectral presence which requires mediumistic intervention to make it manifest as a corporeal entity. For example, on Thursday nights, the back room of The Old Cock and Bull is used for a Folk Club; a regular crowd of 30 or so local middle-aged Folkies gather therein with their guitars, dulcimers, banjos, Black Sea Fiddles, bowed psalteries &c. and a merry old time is had by all, as old chestnuts are warmed, choruses are roared, jokes repeated and shibboleths confirmed, in what is, in effect, a seance. Thus ghosts are raised, possessions are established, doubts are banished and faiths are restored. On Friday nights however, the back room of The Old Cock and Bull is used for The Carvery. How different it is from the night before, even if that couple over there in the corner tucking into their Roast Beef of Old England were just last night singing about it. But who else at The Carvery is to know that? Who else might guess that had they sat in this room but 24 fours earlier how very different it would have been? It's even worse on Wednesday nights; no one uses the back room at all and the landlord doesn't even bother to put the lights on; you might walk through it to get to the gents; you might catch a shadowy movement out of the corner of your eye; as a lorry rumbles past outside you think you hear the sound of singing, distant, yet chillingly vivid since we've learned a new act to drive sorrows away.... But when he lorry is gone, all is silence, as you hurriedly zip up your fly and haste back to the safety of the bar, and the silent TV screen...

I think Folk Music (in the sense that we mean the term here on Mudcat) only exists because a small minority of people make a very particular sort of effort to make it exist. In no way does it have a life of its own, although anyone in the back room of The Cock and Bull on a Thursday night would maybe argue with that one for not only are they mediums, but in the right situation they are The Possessed.