Well I seem to have a foot in most camps here. She who must be obeyed and I do a fair bit of traditional stuff (some not English, indeed perhaps quite a bit not English) and if I'm going to sing a tradition I would rather it was my tradition than someone else's tradition (why would I want to pretend to be foreign? - not that foreign is worse, but I'm me, and I'm English). But we arrange it for ourselves - so the contemporaries don't like it 'cos it's trad adn the traddies don't like it 'cos it's been muched about with. And we muck up the contemporary stuff too.

But I don't see why it is wrong to want to be able correctly to define folk, or to know how the earliest known versions of a song went, or how the composer played it or what his words were (or when the second and third verses got elided). Surely it helps you to know where you're going if you know where you've been.