Sorry, didn't get a chance to read the addition postings properly last night.
"I just hate the idea that songs should be "banned" from a club purely on the basis of when they were written."
Did I miss something - where has anybody suggested that songs should be 'banned'?
I'm intrigued by the idea that we can change language because it doesn't suit our personal preferences.... wonder if Banjiman would care to expand on the idea.
Do we have a referendum; circulate ballot forms, open polling booths, campaign.
Or maybe we take the Humpty Dumpty approach; "A word means what I want it to mean".
The Achilles Heel of all these arguments of course is, no matter how vehemently the 'anything goes' school argue, they NEVER manage (or bother) to produce an alternative definition.
The standard definition of 'folk song' has been in use for half a century and runs as follows:
"Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present with the past; (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.
The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community.
The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, for it is the re-fashioning and re-creation of the music by the community that gives it its folk character."
That more-or-less covers the 'folk' songs I have been listening to and enjoying for the last forty years, and makes a fair stab at describing the many thousands of 'folk' songs discussed or reproduced in the hundreds of books on the subject lining my bookshelves.
Anybody wishing to adapt or replace it is welcome to offer an alternative, but as far as I'm concerned this needs to be based on what has gone before rather than personal taste. In that way, maybe we can avoid snide and inane references to 'woolly jumpers', 'finger-in-ear' and '97 verse ballads'.
Jim Carroll