"i have not contributed to the death of trad music"
Al - I bloody hate this
You seem a nice feller and I'm sure we could both drink ourselves under the table arguing this in a pub and then stagger home with our arms over each other's shoulders, but you appear to have no idea of what folk music is about or the importance attached to it.
"bloody fossils singing songs that have died out cos they weren't all that good anyway."
I find that downright insulting to a genre that has endured for many centuries and served as a form of expression for ordinary working people throughout that time - the only creative form of expression that can be claimed as "ours" (I'm not a bloody "middle class publisher" - I'm a retired electrician trying to understand the culture and history of my forbears and pass on my findings to others.
My introduction to folk song was through the clubs over half a century ago (making me one of your "fossils" I suppose).
That is why I attach so much importance to the clubs being places were people can be introduced to folk song.
This is no longer guaranteed because what I believe to have been clearly defined as folk song has been replaced by a whole bunch of indefinable types of song, there has not been a single workable definition for what goes on in folk clubs today offered up here - not one.
Some people have taken time out to not only denigrate the music that was the mainstay of folk clubs for the best part of my life - but have turned on the people who preserved and passed on that music 'old geezers with their waistbands up under their armpits singing songs that were not good enough to survive' has been the level it has sunk to - me vituperative?
What has replaced the music and song that has been good and important enough to have survived for many centuries and claimed by the people who sang them (the folk) as their own, is largely pop music of one form or another - second/third/forth/fifth rate tribute versions of songs that have been created for a Music Industry that deliberately markets the to have a shelf life of what - one, two, three four months, if you are lucky.
Folk songs not good enough to survive - give us a break Al.
The pop industry today is so unimaginative that it has been forced to dredge up songs that I rejected as crap when I was in my twenties and actually listened to the stuff.
I'm not denigrating what you do - you are entitled to listen to, sing, play what you please - we all are.
My objection is, and always will be, that by describing it as folk it has wrought enormous damage on the access to folk music proper.
You say you sing real folk songs - but not at your folk club - only at home.
Don't you find that more than a little bizarre - I do?
Jim Carroll