Where's Billy Goat Gruff when you need him?

Okay, I'd like to try to get serious for a moment.

Why bother, Firth?
Well, it's kind of a slow day here at the skunk works.
Well, okay then, if you really feel you have to.

Let me see if I can cut through the crap here:

Wilhelm Gottfried von Herder, as far as anyone knows, was the first man to use the word(s) "folk song" (volkslied). By the word "volk" (folk), von Herder was referring to "the rural peasant class."

I think there are a lot of folks people here on Mudcat who are in the same boat I'm in. I did not come from a rural background. I was born in a city and have lived in cities all my life. My father was a professional man. I am not a member of "the rural peasant class." I grew up in a thoroughly middle-class family.

When at university in the early 1950s, I became interested in "folk music." The songs sung and recorded by such singers as Burl Ives, Susan Reed, Richard Dyer-Bennet, and Cynthia Gooding. Later, Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie, Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, and a large variety of other such singers. I learned songs from their records and from song collections like those of the Lomaxes, Carl Sandburg, Cecil Sharp, and many others. After gaining a bit of skill both as a singer and as a guitarist, and with a fairly large repertoire of songs, people started hiring me and paying me money to sing. Most gratifying and enjoyable. As a communications short-cut, most people referred to me as a "folk singer." Indeed, I referred to myself as a "folk singer." Meaning that I am a singer who sings folk songs. I am a singer-guitarist who sings a variety of songs, most of which are traditional/historical songs and ballads.

Am I a "folk singer?" Certainly not in the sense that von Herder meant.

Is there a "rural peasant class" anymore? Well, when you think of the scarcity of small family farms these days, replaced by huge corporate farms, and the fact the most farming these days is done, not with a hand plow drawn by a couple of horses or mules, but by machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, huge feed-lots owned and run by large food companies; ax-wielding loggers of yesteryear replaced by Weyerhauser employees with chain-saws; sails, save for recreation, have been replaced by diesel engines—well, you get the picture. It's a little hard to believe that "the rural peasant class" that von Herder referred to still exists.

This, in my opinion, is the reason there is so much quibbling over the word "folk."

It's a word that has lost much of its meaning because it has been cut loose from its roots in the real world.

Don Firth