"Ask the man in the street what he would include under the heading of 'folk song'."
It's something I, and I believe all of us, have been doing all our lives, talking to people you work with or come in contact with socially. "What do you do out in a hole like Kirkby - they haven't got any pubs out there, have they? ..." Because of my habit of singing as as I worked it went beyond that with people I was employed by as a domestic electrician.
I always got a mish-mash of replies to my queries, ranging from the school - via Sharp, The Spinners, "That rubbish those two Scots gits (Hall Jimmy McGregor) sang on tele last night; latterly Riverdance featured largely in the conversation.
What can I possibly draw from that other than an ignorance, disinterest and occasionally hostility.
The same was the case with the jazz I went to listen to, the "foreign muck" I went to see on the cinema, some of the books I read during the dinner break at work, eating Indian food before it became popular.....
You base what you do on what you know, not on what others don't know or don't care about - surely?
If there was a groundswell which produced a single identifiable, challenging definition, your revisionists might have a case; there isn't; any demand to re-label ourselves comes solely from some of the clubs which, as I have said, haven't engaged with the outside world to any graet extent.
You still haven't commented on what I believe to be a most important point.
Are you going to persuade Steve Roud that he must re-title his work 'The Traditional Song Index', or the EFDSS that henceforth they are to call themselves the ETDSS and rename their journal The Traditional Music Journal.
What are we going to do about the related disciplines, change them to traditional lore and traditional tales and traditional dance and traditional customs?
Or do we adopt our new identity just in the clubs and on forums such as this, making ourselves even more the freemasons lodges we already resemble.
And our literature; rebind our library books to 'Traditional Song In England', 'English Traditional Song - Some Conclusions', 'The Ballad and the Tradition'.... (or maybe we put an 'errata' slip in the relevant ones)?
Sorry Steve, as a dedicated fan of 'The Goons' and 'Monty Python' I'm beginning to think.... nah, couldn't be; and we're still a few weeks away from 1th April.
For me, this is all very reminicent of the Esperanto movement that crashed in flames in the not too distant past.
Our identity as an artistic form is long established and, like it or not, we're stuck with what we've got.
For me, the term 'folk' resonates what we are about; it is not just a music that has undergone a process, it marks who made the songs and where and why they were made; this is reflected in its title.
Personally, I prefer my 'folk' with nowt taken out.
Jim Carroll