Still haven't got into Harker's Fakesong yet, but from what I've read so far the most provocative thing about it is the title. I would say the whole notion of Folk is Fake by default - from the aloof academic gloss, the imperfect science, the taxonomy, the taxidermy, the deference, the reverance, the pure blood-lines - all of which are a million miles away from whatever their natural habitats might have been. What remains, however is an astonishing canon of songs and latter day saintly singers of same that have created something very wonderful as a result. I choose to see this as Steamfolk because it remains a fantasy construct arising from the ghosts of an earlier romance, itself operating at a significant remove from the source of the thing. Not sure how any of that relates to Harker's thesis at all, but then again I'm an artist, and not an academic.

As I said on another thread, the only way Folksong Study can ever become a science is when the technology exists to send a team of crack invisible musicologist back in time to record every single utterance of of every single song and every single singer and subject the results to intense metaanalysis so we might understand just how these things existed in the wild and with respect of their wider cultural context. As it is, the very best we can do is taxonomise the taxidermy of long extinct species and speculate on why one version of any given song type is different for another.

Like Race, there is only one sort of Music; like Race, that Music exists in a myriad of near infinite possibilities. To call some of these musics Folk is an afterthought from on high born of a theory, or a theology, all of which is natural enough in the way human impulse to contain and theorise and believe in stuff real or imagined. I keep coming back to the remit of The International Society for Traditional Music which includes popular, classical and folk forms. There are many musics called Classical - from Ragas to Piobaireachds - and Popular Music lives and thrives on its traditional idioms from R&B to - er R&B. Folk, in this context, becomes the more purposeful visions of those individuals moved to seek amongst their cultural roots, be it of the Old Songs or the vestiges of an older music altogether in drones, modes and monophonies, or else the pure aesthetic of the arcane and archaic which then becomes the creative springboard to something else altogether. Bellamy did this with Kipling Songs; The Unthanks do it with songs Old & New; Brian Peters does it with the Child Ballads. People do it as a matter of course. As individuals though, and always without concensus...