My two cents.

The arguement over what is folk, whether strict categories are useful, necessary, or whatever is a great debate. I see a certain danger in using empirical criteria for these definitions. Although such categories provide a level of utility for different types of indexing, they tend, by necessity, to ignore the crisscrossing web of relationships that all musicians and musical ideas have with each other. (These relationships are much akin to the 6-degrees of separation idea that says you can connect any two people in the world through only 6 intermediate relationships, i.e. person 1 knows person 2, who knows person 3, who knows person 4 etc.) Every artist adds his In music, much more than any other art form, old and new ideas can be taken in by the listener and combined and molded into an new idea, and sometimes, as in the case of bluegrass, a whole new genre.

What is unique in music is that the process is neither evolutionary (resulting in increasing sophisticated and unique, complex (higher?), nor entropic (constantly devolving into increasingly simple homogeneous forms). It is not even generational in the sense that old ideas lose their power to foster new musical progeny. In music the age of an idea is usually an indicator of high rather than low fertility.

When musicians of high or low degree talk about their influences they all have at least one story about how they were hit between the eyes (er..ears, sorry) by something they had never heard before. It can be Dusty Springfield on tour in New York hearing "I know something about love" outside an all night record store at 3am and realizing that minute she had found the music she wanted to sing. It can be George Gershwin wanting to write a Jazz piece for classical orchestra. It can be Bill Monroe combining the country and blues music he heard as a boy into Bluegrass. It can be the Beatles hearing Carl Perkins in one decade and Ravi Shankar the next. It can be Pete Seeger listening to Woody Guthrie. It can be Roger McGuinn (current crusader for the preservation of "traditional" music), playing Bach on his twelve string and generating a hit for The Byrds. The point I am trying to make is that the richness of music as we know it is sustained both in the preservation of so-called "original material" and in the interweaving of that materiel into other parts of the total fabric.

Having said that I'd like to close by bringing this back into the context of the "what is folk" discussion. I'd like to do this by taking the two ideas put forward by Frank ITS and rephrasing them. The first I would characterised as "preservation through conservation" wherin "original" & "pure" forms of a particular type are discovered, restored and maintained, much in the way a great library or museum discovers, restores, and maintains original works of literature and art. The second idea, of which Frank cited Joe Offer an example, is the idea of preservation by incorporation and experimentation. From this point of view the various essenses of songs and stories and melodies and harmonies are gathered and culled and distilled and used in a daily creation of new and old music, on every concievable scale. In church, in the home, on the stage, in the studio, on the street, within the schools, within the family, everywhere and anywhere and in any manner you like. In this view musical ideas are akin to the different ingredients that go into the recipes we use to prepare our food. From this perspective it doesn't always (or even often) matter whether your coquille st jacques (or your blues songs) are made (or played) exactly like someone elses, or even as well. Want more mushrooms? Have an idea about modifying the recipe? Good for you! Feel like putting orange rind in your mashed potatoes? Hey, De gustibus non est disputandum buddy, knock yourself out. That's what its all about in the end, isnt it...experimentation, discovery, creativity, and finding what satisfies you personally?

The reality is that both of these points of view have tremendous, abeit complementary merits. I for one would not want to live in a world without the scholarship of the great and small libraries and museums. I recently shuddered at hearing the story of a local school adminstrator that told the school librarian to throw out all the childrens books published before (I think) 1958 because there wasn't room and they wouldn't have relavance for todays kids anyway. Can you imagine throwing out the Big Woods Books as irrelavant?

On the other hand the essence of any art lies as much in the the degree to which we achieve a uniquely personal expression. The satisfaction comes in part from doing it your way, yourself. I would hate it (and be in big trouble) if to be satisfied I had to play the guitar as well or better than the person who's songs I try to play. The pleasure comes not just from hearing the song, or playing the song or sharing the song. It comes from adding my voice to the creative multitude.