having invented the phrase 'roots music' specifically as an alternative to what he saw as a uselessly imprecise term.

Like Roots Music is any better! All music has Roots - it's in the nature of Music; just all music in being determined by a particular Tradition, is Traditional. Surely the imprecision of Folk (which was built-in from the word go) has become one of its abiding strengths, reflecting a diversity of approaches down the years each of which is very much down to the individual perpetrator and their own particular tradition.

Folk endures for the best - hardly unifying, but comforting in the wider sense of things, especially for we vagrant souls who enjoy that sense of belonging which the Folk Scene is both big enough & small enough to accommodate.