The devil's in the details, because Style (if you insist, although I night think more of Cool, Groove or Swagger), like The Tradition, is an illusion caused by a myriad of smaller reactions and interactions which are in a state of constant organic flux and never once repeat themselves - assuming it is possible to do so anyway, which is open to debate: as Sun Ra said Nature never repeats itself. If we can reduce Folk Style to so simple a formula then it would be easier, but in insisting upon a more musicological understanding of Folk, I'm resisting the Transferable Imperialistic thrust of the term in favour of a more enthnomusicological appreciation of things, such as we find over at the International Council for Traditional Music, which, as we all know, was once the International Folk Music Council who gave us the 1954 Definition in the first place. As I've pointed out in the past, their remit is pretty wide, but they nevertheless distinquished Folk from a muliplicity of other musics which are just as Traditional.

Implicit in any Style is its capacity for change. The overall Folk aesthetic changes from artist to artist, just as a song changes from singer to singer. It's not a catch-all comfort blanket, rather it changes its parameters with every change it becomes subjected to, so much so that any definition must be as mutuable as the thing itself, which, arguably, the 1954 Definition is. But because it was hatched in a hermetic vacuum jar it missed a trick that whilst not all music is Folk Music, all music is, nevertheless Human Music and born of self same traditional process it seeks to enshrine. The class gulf is, therefore, the rather patronising notion of the Individual over the Collective; the Artist over the faceless Community; the rather noxious assumption that The Folk are a different species as that the laws that apply to Them don't apply to Us, and vice versa. So Folk Music is different because the Folk themselves are different; they are lower, nobler; they are ill-educated savages unaware of the significance of their Folkart, which can only be understood by a scholastic elite. As Jean Ritchie said of the time Maud Karpeles denounced her crdentials as a Folk Musician because she'd had an education as was, therefore, all too aware of her craft. This results in the sort pure-blood seeking for the Real and Authentic that I find particularly awkward in European Traditional Music these days, not only because of the Nationalism (and, by implication, Racism) that invariably attends it, but also because even Jim's highly prized Sean-Nos is as much a post-modern invention as the Bodhran or the Celtic Harp.

Yes, yes, there I go again. Enough already - or too much! Now back to that Heavy Petting review...