"Is it time to request assistance from UN Peacekeepers,"
I take it that was posted to lighten the mood PFR
Time after time threads on this subject have been driven into the ground by distortions such as those put up by muskie, by "it's only music and I just wanna sing" and by slagging off and extremist folk policing - take a peek at the number of threads on the subject listed above that have been closed down by the site administrators.
It's always seemed totally grotesque to me that on a site like this, we can't discuss one of the most basic questions - what exactly is folk music.
You have had a summing up of what I believe it is and why I feel it is important.
It's not "more exclusive clauses" of my invention, it's not a new argument - it is the concept of folk music that launched the revival in the fifties, MacColl spent a lifetime advocating and it is covered in the opening chapters of Lloyd's 'Folk Song in England' - music of the people, or 'Voice of the People' as Topic have chosen to call their magnificent series of albums.
If I'd ever had any doubts of the validity of their argument, forty years of work with Travellers, with Norfolk singers and here in West Clare dispelled those doubts - it was their music, they all said it at one time or another.
We're recording a 90-odd year old singer at the moment - he told us, "if somebody sneezed in church a song was made about it".
Those songs were taken up, remembered, changed and passed on - that's what makes them folk songs - they came from and became the voice of 'ordinary people' (whatever that means).
It doesn't mean they are better or worse than other forms of song - I've never argued that they are - some of them are crap in my opinion, but personal preferences should not be part of any of this.
You want to tell me that the products of the music industry are better or more valuable, fine, they are as far as you are concerned, but that does not make them 'folk' - it really is more fundamental than that.
I believe that the folk scene has been largely fucked up because it has lost its base; it has never been taken seriously as an art because we haven't taken it seriously ourselves.
You want to tell me that I, as a working man, belong to a social group incapable of producing a creative culture - feel free - I was being told that over half a century ago by teachers who believed that my future depended on my getting a start on the Fold assembly line in Speke way back when.
I believed it then, until I was lucky enough to meet and work with people who convinced my that it wasn't like that.
Jim Carroll