Rifleman, regarding my observation that there are people on this thread—and others involved in folk music groups—who don't really like folk music, there are precedents in reality for that statement. I am acquainted with a woman who calls herself a "folk singer" and who tells me she writes "folk songs." I've heard her sing some of her songs and even though she's somewhere in her thirties, she is still writing songs about teenaged angst, particularly her own, which she seems unwilling to outgrow. Typical navel-gazing stuff. Her tunes are not very interesting because she, herself, has a limited singing range. They tend to be a cluster of unrelated notes, and for the life of me, I can't recall any of the tunes she has written. And if she didn't repeat some of the lines over and over again, her songs wouldn't last much more than a minute, but they generally go on for at least three.

"What sort of songs do you sing?" she asked me. I reeled of the names of a few songs in my repertoire. Traditional British and American. She wrinkled her nose as if there were a bad smell in the room and said, "Oh! That kind of stuff!" generally dismissing the whole field of traditional music and me with it.

And I have mentioned before the fellow whose repertoire consists of the songs of Jacques Brel. Traditional songs don't interest him in the least, and he suffers through others singing them so he can get a chance to sing Marieke or Ne Me Quitte Pas with his absolutely atrocious French accent. Wot the bloody 'ell is 'e doin' there in the first place? He's there because there is a gathering of people who come together to sing traditional—yes, folk songs. He doesn't give diddly-squat for folk music. He just wants an audience for what he wants to sing.

And these are not isolated incidents, nor are these people all that rare.

And another thing:   it isn't a matter of liking only traditional songs, or liking them only because they are traditional, or liking all traditional songs. I can't speak for others, but my personal musical tastes are pretty broad, including early music, Baroque, classical, some chamber music, some opera, some country and western, some popular music, but I don't much care for a lot of rock and rap. I sing mostly songs from the British and American folk traditions, but I also sing a few songs that are not, but in terms of style, fit nicely into a program of traditional songs. And of the traditional songs I sing, since there are usually several versions available, I select the version that I prefer, since, due to their varying poetic, musical, and generally aesthetic qualities, I don't consider all versions to be equally good. And there are some traditional songs that don't appeal to me at all, so I don't sing them.

Where I get a bit fed up with discussions of this kind is that those who disagree with a particular viewpoint soon resort to attempting to belittle those who hold the viewpoint by accusing them of being incapable of independent thought and adhering to their viewpoint because they are intimidated by some higher authority and haven't the guts to question it or even examine it, thereby dismissing both them and their viewpoint.

This (Pedant alert! Pedant alert!) is an example of the argumentum ad hominem fallacy:   trying to refute an argument, not by addressing the argument directly, but by attacking the person making the argument.

And there's a lot of that going on in this thread.

Don Firth