More laughs over the definition of 'Folk music'.

Whatever the definition is today has to be different from the definition conceived by the middle and upper class collectors of the 19th and early 20th century. They were amazed and impressed that a culture which was to them quite foreign, the working class, had music of merit. Music that was not, and could not be theirs until they claimed it for themselves by labelling it 'Folk Music'.

The people who originated, and had so far carried, this material didn't think of it as folk music. It was just music they heared, liked and sometimes learned and sang. Very much in the same way as callow youths in the sixties heared, liked and sometimes learned and sang songs by Bob Dylan, Elvis Presly or indeed by Jimmy Miller.

Is it altogether too ironic that the music banned by the Folk Police, if they ever really existed, was learned by the same process as used by the originators of the genre while the purists were doing something completely different.

Maybe Paul Simon wannabes were folk singers after all.