is not the test of any song first and foremost whether it moves you, touches you, sends you, with the tedious and thankless task of classification, dessication and pinning onto a board under glass an altogether secondary pleasure?

If you don't want to classify music, don't do it. Beats the hell out of me why anyone should care about definitions they don't care about, if you see what I mean.

Besides, the reason why I do care about definitions is precisely about the pleasure of the music. Traditional music, well performed, blows me away - not invariably, obviously, but much, much more consistently than what I hear from singer-songwriters, even the ones with nice hair. As far as I'm concerned, traditional music is to most 'folk' as the Brandenburg Concertos are to most classical music, or See My Baby Jive is to most pop - it's The Good Stuff. The difference is, there are six Brandenburgs and there's only one See My Baby Jive, but there's more traditional music than I could listen to in the rest of my life. There's a huge stock of this particular Good Stuff, and there's only one set of places where you can get it - events, clubs and venues labelled 'folk'. So it matters enormously whether folk clubs are putting on traditional music or not, precisely because it makes the difference between a pleasant way to pass an evening when there's nothing on telly and an evening that I'll remember for months afterwards.