Jim Carroll 10 Nov 09 - 07:34 AM
"Are you saying that there are no folk songs being written nowadays"
That's about it really - folk is a process, not a style of writing.
'The people' in the sense I believe the the op means, no longer are pat of their cultre, just passive recipients of it.

I've sometimes wondered about this (and sorry for the thread drift here). I'm really not trying to be funny or perverse when I say this, but if 'Yesterday', 'Eleanor Rigby', even 'The Birdie Song' for Chrissakes, are known by a huge number of the population, sung at karaokes and joined in by the whole room, everyone knows it and no one cares who wrote it, does that now make them folk songs? I'm struggling to see the difference between this and the ballad mongers of old wriitng their songs and selling their wares, which then, if they were lucky, became popular songs passed down the generations (as the songs I have mentioned have been). The only change I can see is different times, different technology. The process seems the same.

Sorry. I'll go away now.