John - you are of course right - there are a handful of academics in the UK. I was reacting to your - them-and-us description, which I feel presents a totally false picture. My own experience began where research and performance fed into one another - singer/academics like Bert Lloyd, Vic Gammon, George Deacon, David Atkinson, Bob Thomson - typified by the only one I recognise on your list, Ian Russell - singer, morris-dancer, musician, collector - eventually professor. The rest of your list could be quantum phyicists as far as they have influenced what I understand as "folk". Over this side of the Irish Sea Tom Munnelly would be a main influence - knitting machinist, singer turned collector - awarded a doctorate by Galway University a month or so before his death. Even the early collectors - the hangovers from the Victorian era, actually got their hands dirty at the 'folkface'. Sharp and Karpeles - the favourite target of knockers like Sean, traipsed around the Somerset and into the Appalachians (and in Karpeles case, into Newfoundland) and brought back a goldmine of songs which they attempted to make sense of. Given their pioneering status, they didn't make too bad a job of it, though I would be the first to agree that it could do with updating. All of these have in some way contributed to my understanding of folk from the body of material we had in the early sixties. The much reviled 1954 definition worked for me as a singer seeking a deeper understanding of the songs I sang and it worked for me as a collector trying to find out how the singers we were recording understood and related to their songs - much of which we managed to record. I resent being told by armchair critics like Sean that I and people like me in any way attempted to tamper with what we found - one rather unpleasant piece of work described all collectors as "thieves" (though he boasted teaching his children sea shanties - making him a latter day Fagin, I suppose) The problem isn't that "folk" has come to mean something else, (to the vast majority of people it doesn't mean anything) but that it has lost any meaning whatever, in the revival, that is. We no longer have a consensus as to what we mean - that can't be good for either singers or researchers. Lloyd put it best in Folk Song in England; "If 'Little Boxes' and 'The Red Flag' are folks songs, we need a new term to describe 'The Outlandish Knight', 'Searching Fror Lambs' and 'The Coalowner and the Pitman's Wife' - to which I can only add "or vise versa'.

Jim Carroll