SO'P had declared long and loud that mine, and others like me's idea of folk is the invention of academics and collectors;

Folk is an academic concept of culture defined by criteria developed by outsiders seeking an objective viewpoint - as E.P. Thomson said: Folklore in England is largely a literary record of eighteenth and nineteenth century survivals, recorded by parsons and genteel antiquarians regarding the across a gulf of class condescension. (Folklore, Anthropology and Social History, 1979). The same could equally be said about those involved in the so-called Folk Revival which bears little functional, cultural or socio-economic relation to The Tradition it is claiming to Revive.

And just where did I say I don't believe in research? Maybe that's another of your obtuse misreadings of what I actually wrote. Point is, I know when the sun is up, Jim - it is as empirically self-evident as the true nature of Folk.