What's a house concert? (Or is it a case of "if you have to ask..."?)

Otherwise I tend to agree; in practice I think traddies lost ownership of the word 'folk' some time ago, at least in performance contexts.

I've just looked at the Web pages for a couple of nearby Folk Clubs.

Chorlton Folk Club:
Every Thursday at about 9 (usually a bit later), Jozeph MCs and a mix of young singer-songwriters and life-hardened old timers play all kinds of music.

Sale Folk Club:
modern and traditional Folk Songs from England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, America. Rhythm & Blues features as does Country and Western and many people perform their own excellent material. The mixture is very eclectic with the likes of Dylan, Guthrie, The Beatles, Fats Waller, Jez Lowe, Allan Taylor, Richard Thompson, Jake Thackray and many more being represented.

By contrast, the singarounds I actually go to - and which are mostly traditional in content - are the "Sunday Singaround" and "Songs and Tunes at the Beech"[1]; no mention of the F-word.

I still think it's worth talking about, though, just because of my experience - which I'll recapitulate here in two lines:

2008: At the age of 47 I discover folk songs[2] and a community of people who know them, and almost immediately feel that this is the music I want to listen to (and sing) for the rest of my life.

2003: I become a regular performer at the local folk club.

Five years. It was fun at the time, God knows, but how I resent those years now. (I wasn't exactly young to start with.)

[1]Recently relocated and currently trading as "Songs and Tunes with the Beech Band". Fortunately they're quite well behaved and will shut up and listen if you'd rather sing without the Beech Band.

[2]Obviously I knew there were such things - I had my Pentangle and Steeleye Span albums, I'd been to Lark Rise. But until I started going to that singaround I thought they were a bit of a curiosity, and in any case a very limited resource - after all, even Steeleye had ended up doing their own stuff. I had no idea just how many traditional songs it was possible to sing - and just how good they could sound. And I would never have learned that from a "very eclectic" mixture of "all kinds of music".