Hmmmm - Methinks I'll ignore Shimrod's post as being typical of the fundamentalist hysteria I've encountered on this thread thus far. I will, however, take issue with his calling my last post specious - nothing in the world is more specious that the 1954 Definition or yet its adoption as absolute by the Folk Faithful. As I've indicated here already, maybe WLD had a point after all...

Otherwise:   

As some of us keep saying, "these things are different from those things" is not a value judgment.

To say that a Folk Song can only be a Traditional Song is a value judgement; it is rejecting all the other music that occurs within a Folk Context as not being real Folk Music because it is judged not to be so by a set of (quite possibly specious) criteria. Accordingly, most of what will be heard at, say, The Fylde Folk Festival this year won't actually be Folk Music, and most of what will be heart at The Steamer Folk Club tonight won't actually be Folk Music. It also says that the 100% improvised music I play on folk instruments isn't Folk Music, nor yet is 97% of Kip of the Serenes by Dr Strangely Strange. How is that not a value judgement?   

Individual creativity and vernacular variation aren't an alternative explanation to the folk process - they're a central part of it.

Individual creativity and vernacular variation are an observable alternative to a theory which in no way can be subjected to any sort of empirical scrutiny. The evidence is circumstantial and the interpretation of that evidence as a Folk Process remains suspiciously (and quite possible speciously) convenient. Interestingly, I first came across the term in a sleeve-note by Roger Nicolson to his 1976 album Times and Traditions for Dulcimer thus: Almaine. Adapted from a piece based on a traditional dance form by Bartholomew Penkil (?-1670) in the Baltic Lute Book. The folk process continues...

I'm cool with that.      

Is Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez folk music? I've heard it at a folk club.

Me too, although not with the orchestra, which is perhaps a crucial factor in my accepting it as folk music in that context. As I've said elsewhere in other contexts it might be something else altogether, but when Folk play Music, in the name of Folk Music, then what else can it be other than Folk Music? This is my Folk as Flotsam theory by the way; anything that floats can be Flotsam - it is defined by context alone. Of course there might be those who insist that only articles accidentally discarded from a ship can be real Flotsam (and that those articles deliberately discarded are Jetsam) but for the purposes of us every day beach-combers, Flotsam is defined simply, and pragmatically, as something from elsewhere that has been fetched up by the sea - be it a fishing float from France, a For Sale sign from the Wirral, or a tree trunk from the Liffey. There is also a generality of understanding here; Folk Musicians and Singers in Folk Clubs and singarounds aren't professionals, they are hearty amateurs, very often non-musicians; non-musos certainly. Therefore much of the charm of actual folk music (its folk character if you will) lies in the evident and entirely corporeal shortfall between intention and result. It lies in the immediacy of its empirical realisation and experience thereof; it can never happen that way again. This is not to justify the GEFF conspiracy, just to recognise that some of us will never amount to anything more than bad pop singers. So - Come-All-Ye!   

Really, it comes down to one question: is it ever possible to listen to someone performing at a folk club or singaround and then say, "that was good but it's not what I'd call folk music"?

If that's the case you must ask yourself (as I have done many the time) why it wasn't folk music? And how it might have been folk music? And by what means a definition of Folk Music (even the 1954 Definition) might be vague enough to allow for the fact that it is, in fact, folk music?

*

This is an epiphany for me; I've emerged out of a crisis of the faith in which I very nearly rejected the whole idea of Folk Music simply because of the impossibility of the 1954 Definition and those who adheer to it. However, when I do THIS, I am doing Folk Music, Feral folk indeed; and in doing so, the folk process continues...