"Music is not meant to be put on a shelf and looked at."
No, as a veteran club organiser and singer of some thirty years standing (and sitting), I totally agree; but with live folk music, just like books, it is nice to know where to look for it when you want it.
"I'm sure you are aware that there are at least 500 books that adhere to a broader definition of folk as well."
Have to admit I didn't know there were that many, but I can't think of one that sets down an alernative definition in black-and-white.
Was really responding to SS's half-a-dozen whining traddies snide.
One of my problems with all this is the insults to injury bit.
At the height of my folk-clubbing, while I always had one or two permanent clubs to go to, I always made a point of visiting as many others as possible, sometimes four or five times a week.
Gradually these prove so unsatisfactory that they dwindled down to my two regulars.
Not only was I listening to less and less 'folk proper' but quite often the standards were appalling in the terms of what the performers were doing.
We got pop wannabes who would have been booed off the stage of the back room of my local, music hall performers who couldn't manage a comic song if it would save them from imminent execution, and would-be opera singers who would make Florence Foster Jenkins sound like Maria Callas.
The folk scene was becoming a refuge for rejects who weren't good enough to make their way in their own chsoen forms - a cultural dustbin.
Clips I have been guided to on this forum convince me that nothing much has changed in this respect.
Jim Carroll