Once again a 'what is folk' thread rides off into the sunset without anything significant (or even new) being advanced and leaving behind a trail of recrimination and bad-feeling. It always seems to me that the subject is always approached on the somewhat strange premise that no definition of 'folk' and 'tradition' exist and that we always have to start from scratch in creating one. This is, of course, not the case; perfectly sound definitions have been in place for a long time; oceans of ink and rainforests of paper have been expended in dealing with the subject. It is hard not to notice that once again, those uncomfortable with the old definitions have singularly failed to come up with alternatives. As far as I am concerned, the definitions accepted by Cecil Sharp, Francis Child, Bertrand Bronson, Bert Lloyd, David Buchan, Vaughan Williams, Frank Kidson, Gavin Greig, George Gardiner, Lucy Broadwood, Anne Gilchrist, Ewan MacColl, Alan Lomax, Gordon Gerould.......... and all those who have had a part in forming my ideas, and those of many others, and brought us into the music in the first place by putting pen to paper on the subject over the last century, still work for me. They may be, (are) in need of fine-tuning, but it is nonsense to ignore them. Perhaps these epics could be approached by those who have problems with those definitions explaining what those problems are, and perhaps it should be borne in mind that nobody is 'telling' anybody what and what not to sing. In my experience terms like 'folk police', 'finger-in-ear', 'folk fascist' and 'purist' are usually to be found on the lips of those who appear to have no workable definitions of 'folk' and 'traditional' and are invariably directed at those of us who have.                           
Jim Carroll