Folk is about life, the everyday stuff, like making a living, invariably by doing something else. A lot has been said about this on Muscat, and no doubt will be again, but I get my folk in folk clubs, singarounds, field-recordings & other documentary / archive / experimental sources, and seldom, if ever, from professionals, though as a sort-of professional myself (albeit a storyteller) I am of course appreciative. When you hear that Peter Bellamy couldn't make a living in England as a folk singer then you realise something was, and probably still is, seriously amiss somewhere. With Bellamy's death, something changed, though I feel if only he'd hung on he'd be a national icon by now, held as he is high esteem by a new generation who would only be too willing to appreciate his genius.

The best of it resists commodification, it's just there in all its communal & empirical immediacy, functional to a collective catharsis providing essential release from the daily grind as it has done for thousands of years.