"I feel amateur clubs (be they water-colourists showing at the local library, home bakers making cakes for the fete, or folkies having a singaround in the upstairs function room of a pub) aught not to be compared to, or judged by the same standards as, professional artists, chefs, or musicians."

Ah...there are whole "process vs product" debates here which have preoccupied the community arts world for decades...many in community arts actually resent their work being always regarded as somehow inferior to that of professionals, and the assumption that the process is more valuable than the outcomes.


On the whole, I agree with you that the standards are different - but not everyone in the folk world (and certainly at Mudcat) would.

The main difference in folk is the thing we talked about earlier, with the lines between the professionals and the punters being far less distinct than they are with other types of music, and perhaps with other activities such as cooking or art. When it comes to folk, which is ostensibly about ordinary people making music, but where the snot-nosed kid who grew up sucking on their bottle of pop in the local folk club might be tommorrow's Kate Rusby or Rachel Unthank or Andy Cutting, people don't necessarily perceive those differences of judgement about the "amateur" and the "professional" quite so clearly. I sometimes think that proximity to commercial success breeds a certain contempt; a view that "if so-and-so's kid can suddenly be a folk celebrity, well then I certainly could have been too, if I'd just tried hard enough and had the right breaks."

As I say, this line of thinking, nine times out of ten, is self-delusion. But it certainly generates its fair share of sour grapes at times.