I suspect that one big reason why this discussion persists is that some people are quite adamant that there is a line to be drawn between singers of traditional material and singers who sing songs they've written influenced by traditional material. No matter how deep and how manifest that influence might be, for some it still musn't be thought of as 'folk'.

As for me, when I say I like folk music I am thinking of Bert Jansch, Dave Evans, Gillian Welch, and Mary Hampton just as much as I am Cyril Tawney, Shirley Collins, Walter Pardon et al. For me, it's all part of the big picture.

(The absurdity of the "it's not folk if it's a song written by a contemporary performer" stance is abundantly clear in the case of performers who sing both traditional and their own material. At what point do they cease to become 'folk' singers? How many original songs are they permitted per album before their license to folk is revoked? What's the ratio?)

However, I don't think of, say, Joni Mitchell or Joanna Newsom or Newton Faulkner as folk. Their music quite simply isn't rooted in folk the way the other names I mentioned is. They're singer-songwriters who happen to use acoustic instruments. It's quite rare that I enjoy this kind of singer-songwriter. Early Leonard Cohen is about the only one I can think of (and anyway, you can hear a rich Spanish folksong influence on those records so they arguably don't count.) The only recent exceptions I can think of are Citizen Helene (myspace.com/citizenhelene) and Gemma Garmeson (myspace.com/gemmagarmeson).

So I'll continue to call myself a folk singer rather than a singer-songwriter, even though I sing hardly any traditional folk songs. I play at a lot of singer-songwriter open mics, and what I do doesn't sound remotely like what they do.