Sinister Supporter –

I still don't understand a few things:

You're not advocating anything, you're celebrating what happens in folk clubs. And yet this state of affairs has caused you "despair' in the past, and you started this thread to the separate the wheat ("Traditional Song") from the chaff ("all the other stuff currently being done In the Name of Folk"). So you are celebrating the chaff that causes you despair?

You believe that "(t)here is no alternative definition - just a meaningless shibboleth . . ." Is there really no alternative to your insistence that 'folk music is what happens in folk clubs'? No alternatives to a self-referential tautology? I think Don Firth, Howard Jones and Jim Carroll provided some clear alternatives. If you feel like cracking open a book, there are some American folklorists who don't fit into your false dichotomy.

But then have you admitted that you are offering a re-definition of Folk Music? I still say you are comparing unlike things. The 1954 definition, for all its shortcomings, can be applied cross-culturally; your re-definition tells me about what happens in the English folk clubs you frequent, and nothing more.

I have to confess that I am beginning to suspect that this entire thread is nothing more than a tremendous wind –up on your part.