The whole question of what folk music is is one that has it's value. It's a great soporific.

I'm finding this discussion interesting, though. I don't normally get wound up in all of this but reading the thoughtful, and just funny posts makes me realize that folk music in the UK means something quite different than in the U.S.A. And like any generality, that's not completely true. Back in the fifties and early sixties over this way if I'd even thought about it at any great length (which I didn't) I'd say that traditional folk music was the Child Ballads and Appalachian variants of them. While there are many songs in that tradition that I love, the body of folk music that really attracted me was a mixture of old ballads, early 1900's popular music, early country music, blues and gospel. To folkies, The Carter Family are folk singers. To country music fans, they were early, influencial country music singers. Charlie Poole did a wonderful mixture of old fiddle tunes and breakdowns, liberally seasoned with popular music from the twenties. For Folkways records, Doc Watson was mountain folks, standing on the porch of a run-down house in the Appalachians. To his neighbors, he was this guy who played everything from old ballads and gospel to rockabilly on electric guitar. When they recorded some of the old blues men like Lighnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, they did folk albums on acoustic guitar, even though they usually played electric guitar. I suppose all of that music sounded traditional to me because it grew out of a tradition that stretched back to the Child Ballads.

Folk Legacy recorded a series of albums that they called something like The Living Tradition, which made sense to me. I've never thought of traditional music dying on a particular date, any more than the music died when Richie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper died. I think of traditional music as something living and evolving. I don't think it appreciates being trapped in old books or treated like an ancient artifact.

Each of us has our own definition of what traditional music is. Rather than seeing that as a hindrance to communication, I find it an invitation to wonderful, thoughtful conversations. There are marvelous gray areas that defy definition... non "traditional" songs done by "traditional" singers, and "traditional" songs done by "non-traditional" singers. I always thought that Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys did the definitive version of The Boston Burglar. But then, is that song traditional?

It eventually comes down to what it is in the ear of the belistener.

Jerry