Can I just make clear my position on the clubs and folk music.
I came on to the scene in the early sixties when virtually everything being presented as folk was just that – folk. We had some access to the BBC material collected ten years earlier through the Caedmon/Topic 'Folk Songs of Britain' series, and, thanks to some prodding by Alan Lomax we were examining our own British and Irish repertoires. It wasn't all great by any means, but the enthusiasm 'buzzed' and I can't recall people who got up to sing who were incapable of holding two notes together or reading from scripts – we all thought that the stuff we were doing was worth making an effort for.
Some clubs were 'purist' and frowned on non-folk songs and musical instruments, others like the Lloyd/MacColl camp, used accompaniment and saw the tradition as an inspiration for creating new songs. I was a part of this latter crowd; I even regarded Dylan as worth a listen before he 'popped out' of the scene and went for the big bucks. I admired songwriters like MacColl, Seeger, McGinn, Tawney, Pickford and the many others who were creating in the folk idiom – it was really what we were about. With the Radio Ballads I really thought we'd made it – the perfect marriage of the tradition and newly written songs.
In the mid seventies things started to change and by the eighties it became virtually impossible to be guaranteed a night of folk or folk related songs, the clubs had become a platform for navel-gazing introspective mumbling their way through stuff that was neither fish nor fowl; so thousands of walked away and what I described further up the thread happened – clubs, audiences, magazines, radio and TV programmes – all gone quicker than you could say Led Zepplin! And along with them, any chance of being taken seriously by the establishment in order to set up the necessary archives and libraries desperately needed to preserve what we had collected from the tradition. The big bang in the club scene was marked by a series of articles and letters in the then leading folk magazine, Folk Review entitled 'Crap Begets Crap'.
The scene hadn't yet become the refuge for failed, fifteenth-rate pop performers and would be Sinatra wannabes, that it has since become, but that didn't take too long to happen.   
With this latter we lost something else; the chance to attract new blood to our music; no self respecting youngster is going to bother their arse listening to crappily performed pop songs by crumblies like us when they have easy access to the real thing – would any of you?
I've got no objection to people playing and singing what rings their particular bell – the more the merrier – but please don't call it folk, or even folk-inspired unless you are ready to define your terms.
Steamin' Willie;
"Well, I still haven't read two replies that agree on "folk" songs."
As I said, buy a book if you have real problems.
Folk is probably the most well-researched and documented of all musics; the fact that today's tiny handful of folkies can't (or don't want to) define the term indicates a nasty case of dyslexia rather than a problem of definition.
Speak for yourself - or point out one song which is "...so old nobody can remember their original meaning." I would guess I'll have to wait as long as I have waited for an answer to my original question, which was, in the hope of getting an answer, if a Gounod piece from Faust is performed at a folk club, is it folk?
Where are these 'totally everbody' people who claim that love songs are defined as 'folk' - that's a totally new one on me?
Phony accent - MacColl came from a Scots backgound - I knew his mother when she was in her 70s and sometimes had problems understanding her Perthshire accent. He grew up surrounded by Scots people and chose the accent in order to sing songs of his heritage - whether he did the accent well enough is a matter of opinion, but it's certainly preferable to the strange Mid-Atlantic hybrid I heard at many clubs.
Tiresome chestnut about MacColl's name change - can I assume you feel the same about Robert Zimmerman?
Thank you for those kind words Matt Seattle - the cheque's in the post.
There - that must put me in the running for the wordiest Catter!!
Jim Carroll