No, Suibhne is wrong; the lack of understanding comes afterwards. He can't understand that eating a cake is a totally different experience from looking at a picture of one and I don't understand why he doesn't see that.

Once again I hear the horrible sound of a folk-head being pushed with exquisite perversity up its own folk-arsehole; a slippery-slimy-shitty-slurp that, for all I know, might even be pleasurable, especially with respect to folk gastropods such as our very own Sycophantic Mollusc for whom this sort of bizarre behaviour would appear to be second nature.

No one mentioned fecking cake, TS - let alone pictures of cake. We're talking about music, which is a very different business altogether although there are times when I've baked something so perfect I might be tempted to take a picture of it - like This, which is, in fact, my own improved Porridge Method; feel free to PM me for the recipe. However photographs of cakes don't have the same temporal relationship to cakes as recordings of music do to live music - at least they shouldn't. In the Folk World, however, I think maybe they do, which is maybe where the confusion is arising, given that so much of the canon is derived from field-recorded documents that are rarely appreciated as pleasurable listening material in themselves. Rather they are source documents, artefacts to be studied in the absence of a corporeal Henry Mitchelmore or Pop Maynard (both of whom appear on VOTP #7 featured in the above linked image); they are mere residue, simply ghosts of the real thing.

Even Revival Folk Albums tend to be fairly straightforward recordings of the artistes as you might hear them performing in a Designated Folk Context; for sure few folk artistes have grasped the concept of using the studio as an instrument to produce stuff that they couldn't perform in a live situation. Exceptions abound I'm sure - Bright Phoebus is fascinating in this respect in that it's an entire sonic world in itself, a truly studio orientated piece of Folkish Excess that would defy live reproduction both in terms of its production & performance. And it sounds exquisite, unlike many other Folk Pop / Folk Rock albums before or since. In Folk, however, such exceptions only serve to prove rules, although the sonic world on other Leader albums (such as the beautifully produced Times and Traditions for Dulcimer by the trio of Roger Nicholson, Jake Walton and Andrew Cronshaw) would suggest an awareness at least that records, even Folk Records, aren't simply pictures of cake. Much more cake-like are the innumerable home baked folk albums, once on cassette, now on CD-R, which are indeed merely pictures of cake; cakes as they see themselves indeed; self-portraits of a self-actualised ideal of cake, however so imperfect, which to my mind is the very soul of what this cake music is all about. Folk will indeed eat itself.

I must confess at this point I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about pornography, at the very least erotica, but I'll resist that one. Instead, here's a very non-pornographic picture of yours truly performing at The Red Deer in Sheffield with my old pals Martin Archer & Neil Carver - Sedayne / Archer / Carver / September 2007. Note the Tetley mirror as might be seen in the Cath & Phil Tyler video linked to below. I might also add that Cath & Phil dropped in on us on that occasion, en route from Manchester to Sheffield with the amazing Pekko Kappi and we all ended up supping coffee on the pavement tables of The Coffee Bean in Lytham where the conversation turned to The Housecarpenter, at least Cath's version of it, False True Love, which she proceeded to give full voice to as we sat there in the cold February sunshine, thus giving at least one dear old Lytham lady cause to raise her eyebrows in astonished approval as she went about her daily business. Nice when things like that happen.   

*

Or rather, that's half of it - and that's the half that still happens and always will, for as long as anyone sings anything. It's the other half that's been eroded, almost into nothingness, by recorded and broadcast music.

Given that this other half you speak of is entirely theoretical, even to the point of being theological, doesn't this compromise your entire notion of what makes a Folk Song a Folk Song? Or do such things not matter to the folk faithful who might glibly spout such fantasies as though they were not only facts, but absolutes that account for every single variation of every single song that has come down to us? If this second stage didn't happen (after all the evidence that it did is purely circumstantial; as Brian points out, no-one really believes in 'collective composition' any more) does that mean there is no such thing as Folk Song as you understand it?