for BSeed...I sort of lost track of this thread..you asked if I intended to define 'folk'...I set myself a goal awhile back of writing up my personal idea of what 'folk/trad' means and a more general idea of what it even means to have categories at all...(obviously, I think categories are useful if there is some general agreement about them)..the famous Big Bill Broonzy line is cute, but solves nothing.

The real problem is, there ARE categories...the record stores use them...but the parameters set to determine what goes IN each category are slippery indeed! The problem is especially tricky with folk. If you like Irish or 'Old Timey', or C&W, it is a bit easier...but all these get called 'folk', too...so I prefer to call a certain type 'traditional', even though that still doesn't solve the problem, as 'trad' is gradually being updated. Therefore, my 'thesis' will NOT draw any rigid boundries, but only point out a few things which would exclude some things...is 'Iron Butterfly' folk? I don't think so...if you do, we shall never be able to run a record store together...*smile* Is Arlo? Is Woody? Is John Prine? Depending on how many of the ctiteria on my checklist you apply, the answer is 'sort of but not really'. None of them have all, or even most, of the criteria which came with the early notions of 'folk/trad', though all of them have some, and Woody is durn near there! (many of his songs are being sung by people who have no idea of who wrote them...oral tradition, etc.)

But, I repeat...any definition requires agreement to be useful. If I want to listen to folk music , and a club advertises such, I need to double-check what THEY mean by it! I may want old ballads, while they are booking Mary Chapin Carpenter. Having less eclectic tastes than some, I consider this a nuisance, but there is little I can do. This web site is run by Max, and he is pretty liberal about what he encourages...the database is administered by Dick G., and he is less liberal about what he fills it with..if I were doing it, I would be even less liberal. *shrug*...as I said in a long ago thread, I wish there were other sites doing a similar thing for singer-sonwriter stuff...etc..and drawing most of that traffic away from this one, but since I am a guest here, I make do and sift for what I want...It's just that every now & then something triggers my Linnean soul and I ramble on like this about Genus and Species..*lol*...(I also work with wood, and really HATE it when someone calls a wood by some local variant of a common name and then tries to sell it to me without knowing or caring what it 'really' is..)"yep, that there is Ironwood"..(there are 40-50 species that get called 'ironwood')....I know, it is not exactly the same thing as the music question, but.....

So..one of these days I'll have enough of my thesis to throw out for perusal, and it can then be debated, revised, or ignored by the multitudes...I guess it is mostly just an exercise for me, to work out in detail my own opinion and be able to debate better ..*grin*