Well, Don (and not meaning to start a fistfight like I just witnessed on another thread) can we start by suggesting that if it is played by a sax-a-mo-phone, vibes, and an anorexic pastey white guy wearing a beret singing obscure poetry, that it is likely not folk? How 'bout a 120-piece orchestra that has to read its music from pages and be led by a conductor? Or how about if there're three or four barely-dressed (and also anorexic) men with lots of body piercings and paint prancing wildly 'round the stage and projected by 2 dozen of the biggest Marshall stacks? (I may have that number wrong; I don't know Marshall stacks from bung stacks. I just remember hearing the term from some rockers, is all.) Would that not probably *not* be folk to most of us?

I concede that a very tight and workable definition is allusive. But I also assert that it is possible to have a general sense of it. And I think that most of what has been suggested fits. So how do *you* give meaning to the term "folk music?" No, seriously.