"Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer"
Somebody loaned me a copy of their Child ballad album earlier this year - I got three tracks in and gave it back - dreadful schmaltz!
As I said, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.
This should not be about personal taste, which is, as the label said, 'personal' and has nothing whatever to do with definition, which, once challenged, is avoided like the plague by people who don't actually like folk/traditional song but for some inexplicable reason, want to use the title for their own, unrelated songs.
MacColl once said in an interview we did with him that folk songs have served people for many centuries and have managed to survive true to their own utterance and in different forms throughout that time, but they will never survive if they fall into the hands of people who don't like them - that statement is beginning to make sense to me.
I've always been disturbed by those who described the old singers who were generous enough to give us our beautiful repertoire of songs with phrases such as "old man crooning out of tune into a cheap microphone entertainment" - ungracious, to say the least.
No - folk is not taste - you silly man - you cannot 'like' a genre of music into existence, any more than you can dislike it out of existence - it is what it is whether we like it or not (otherwise, there would be no Wagner, as afr as my tastes go!!)
I am appalled that a racist such as Bozo-no-Brain (the poster who described the ten Travellers recently burned to death in a tragic fire here in Ireland as "thieving Gyppos". when the news of their death was announced), should renew his attacks on Travellers on this thread - please go away.   
Jim Carroll