So... Not so much a dreary axiom as a truism, which is just as dreary.

So is the Folk Music of Yugoslavia mispackaged as Folk? To me Ethnic music would be a more suitable term; ethnomusicological documents, which is one approach to such things that wouldn't be appropriate to a Gary and Vera Aspey album, where Folk fits like a glove. Now that the IFMC are the ICTM then that fits, to a point. We might draw a line in the sand between Folk and Traditional Music - i.e. the Music of Revival and the music of Tradition - though the majority of Folkies I talk to don't think there's a difference, they think they're part of The Tradition, which seems a tad conceited to me, especially when the vast majority of the songs they sing aren't what we might think of as Traditional Folk Songs.

Even in singing TFSs I'm not carrying on a Tradition, I'm just singing Traditional Folk Songs which are products of a Tradition, just as any song is. I recently started a blog about this called An Oblique Parallax of English Speaking Folk Song which features examples of me performing TFSs in a way that would have me linched if I did it in a Folk Club but which comes vbery natural to my creative sense as an experimental / free improvising musician.

Another dilema you see, because as much as I love this stuff, I can't swallow the Folk Faith; all I see is genre, idiom, mastery and continuity, same as with all musical styles. Folk is just another umbrella for various stles of music which must include Big Al Whittle as much as it does Brian Peters or Michael Grosvenor Myer or...