WLD, apart from SWMBO, there seem to be a number of people above who criticise the performance of folk music as typically involving some sort of fake accent - it therefore being (so they say) fake and unconnected with "real life".

Now everything I have heard from links to your performances shows me that you are a terrific singer and player (although, no offence, I think that Martin Carthy's guitar playing is without peer) - but everything that I have so heard shows me that what you are doing is more rooted in americana than in anglicana - yet you are not american. So that too is fake.

Shirt murderer, that is your explanation.

WLD, in context therefore I have to prefer Norma Waterson's theory of relevance to yours.

Similarly suspension of disbelief is not part of the function of a musician. It is the centre of the function of an actor. No-one is supposed to come out thinking that the Rolling Stones ever had been "walking in the cotton fields"

And what whoever the fool being quoted by the new Gigi above misses is that there is a definition of folk music - a definition that is consistent witht he meaning of the word "folk" in understanding a whole range of other folk arts, whereas that has never been true (at least as far as anyone on this learned forum was able to say when I started a "what is country" thread) of "country". Once you abandon that definition of "folk" (which SWMBO seems to think is justified because some people are not as good as her) then it is twaddle to say that folk (or whatever you want to use as a term for "folk-like" music that is not 1954 definition folk) has not moved on to a world in which teh horse has been replaced by the motorcycle, as much of RIchard Thompson's output, or even Jim Causley's recent project album (extending by analogy the land grab of the Inclosure Acts to the purchase of the Royal triangle by the stinking rich) demonstrate.   Ironic, isn't it? By and large the same people who complain that "folk" is stultified are often the same people who use the word in a way that proves that it is not.

Oh, and another outright lie from SWMBO further above. At no stage did I say that homophobia was not immoral. It is immoral (but although some discrimination against those of specified gender preferences is illegal, not all homophobia is illegal). My point (which she wilfully misses) is that the unfounded derogatory categorisation of English folk music or other English traditions is just as immoral as the unfounded derogatory categorisation of other ethnic traditions or of gender preferences. That is why Parris was wrong, as well as gratuitously offensive, and should apologise.