"that evolution you keep wittering on about."
Huhhhh!!
"Stop telling usability bloody rules. "
Huhhhh!!
"When did folk songs become fragile flowers that had to separated from all others and only performed on their own away from other music as if they were museum pieces?"
When did anybody ever make such a suggestion Vic? Certainly not me.
We had poetry and song evenings; feature evenings, agit prop theatre evenings and various other structured forms, but whatever we did, we ascertained that the audience went home having heard a good number of folk songs well sung.
The Radio Ballads were combinations of traditional song, newly written ones, jazz at times, pop at times, songs made using Gilbert and Sullivan forms and human speech - hardly "separated from all others".
Please stop putting up straw men - you're better than that.
Folk song may be robust" - it will probably survive in archives when folk clubs are no longer venues for it.
I am arguing about (a) The dishonest practice of filling a folk club evening with songs that are patently not and (b) Seeking to de-define folk song, without explaining exactly what you mean by folk.
You know as well as I do what folk is, at l;east, when I have asked for an alternative definition, you nor anybody else has come up with one - not one single person.
Your loaded "siphoned-off situation, doesn't make sense.
If I want Jazz - one of my other interests, - I seek out a a jazz venue, somewhere advertising jazz - If I don't find it there, I don't go back
The same with classical music, or Country and Western, or light opera,...... or any other musical form you care to name.
Wonder how a pop audience would react if they turned up at their local venue to be given an evening of selection from the Joe Heaney songbook - love to be a fly-on-the-wall that night!!
Yet we seem to be told - by long term folk club organisers - that we have to take pot luck and accept whatever type of song, pop, music hall, opera..... whatver the organisers choose to give us.
That is sharp practice - if that'; what you want to do call your clubs music clubs.
I didn't become involved because of what music my family liked - I did so because I became interested in a certain type of music - which later extended to listening to and trying to make songs using the forms of that music.
I became more deeply involved when I realised the social and historical implications of that music - how it related to various aspects of my family history or that of the people around me.
I have always been aware that our traditional singers sang and listen to all types of music
When we started collecting we found that the singers we met differentiated between the different types of songs they sang - maybe not using the same terms as we did, but they slotted their songs into categories as (or I) do.
Walter Pardon filled tape after tape with talk of how he regarded his songs and how they differed from one type to the ther.
It transpires from his notebooks that he had been doing so from the late 1940s.
Walter wasn't by any means alone - Blind Traveller, Mary Delaney, gave us over 100 traditional songs - she refused point blank to sing her dozens of Country and Western songs because "they;'re not the type of songs you are looking for - I only learned them because that's what the lads aske for in the pub".
Similarly, we have Walter on tape when we tried to record his Victorian parlour and early pop songs saying, "what do you want them old things for?" - tey differentiated - it seems the 'more enlightened' folk clubs no longer do..   
When I lived in Manchester, I regularly used to visit a pub on the Stretford Road that ran a competitive singing talent night - Tom Jones - Elvis - Harry Lauder - Pat Boone - John McCormack.... soundalikes; a free nights drinking for the winner
I thoroughly enjoyed those nights and looked forward to them and I knew what to expect and what not to expect.
That, it seems to me, is what is being argued for here.
Fine - no problem as far as I'm concerned, but don't call yourselves folk clubs or your songs folk songs - neither is a fair description.
Jim Carroll