Given your somewhat catch-all definition that a folk song is anything that is performed in a folk club why can't Blackleg Miner be one?

Why? Simply because it's so evident a forgery by someone who out to have known better. Whilst it manages to convince on every level, it isn't what it claims to be: it is fake, bogus, couterfeit, phony; it is an excercise in specious fraudulence by someone who, as I say, really ought to have known better.

My catch-all definition was, in fact, an evidence-based exercise towards an empirically based understanding of the nature of Folk as we find it in the Field - the Designated Folk Contexts of this world, including Mudcat and The Digital Tradition. Like any other religion, Folk remains a Faith that only has any meaning to the Faithful, founded as it is on various myths, agendas, credos and shibboleths which are entirely extraneous to the Traditional Source of the thing. This is not to call into question the sincerity of believers, just to point out that Folk does not, in fact, exist outside of this faith - nor did it ever. Folk came into being via the sharp cultural practise of bourgeouis revivalists who fabricated the very perspectives which remain of such appeal to both the Folky Faithful and the Nationalists alike, as the present topic demonstrates. You can't fabricate a National Folk Music then complain when the Nationalists take it to their hearts. On the contrary, it is this myth of a National Folk Music that helps engender such notions of Nationalism in the first place.

A half-century old windmill she may be, but she's still grinding her corn and paying her tax as good as she was back in her day. So well worth the tilting I'd say!

S O'P