Richard - don't dare to presume to tell anyone that they're wrong, much less insist that you might be right, whatever sort of absolutist logic you might insist upon. Folk is all about the Zeitgeist; it is all about subjective perception (as if there was any other sort) and aesthetics pure and simple. Folk is the beauty in the eye of beholder; it is the mutable wave of collective fashion that we each see very differently indeed. There are no rights and wrongs, only personal opinions. Jim is only right in saying what he does because that's the way he sees it; it's certainly not the way I see it, but then again my Atheism is more inclusive than that, but that's just me, even though we both love the same things.

How do I see it? I've already accounted for Child 102, but generally the term Folk Balladry can mean pretty much what you want it too. This isn't a case of the Humpty Dumpties, just a more pragmatic acknowledgement that in music there are no correct procedures, much less terminology on which we might agree upon with severe qualification. For sure, any given A might equal 440, but as to what the relative Major Third then equals very much depends on your temperament. So if I sing a Traditional Ballad then it's Folk by default, like the recording I did last week of The Wife of Ushers Well in which I freely intone Childs's A text (from memory) whilst freely improvising on my 5-string violin (AKA The Accursed Viol - you can add Lovecraft to that list too). Whilst the whole thing is anchored to a drone, it is is otherwise completely atonal, though I think of this as amodality rather than atonality per se. And just as the performance is essentially non-rhythmic, I've added a xenochronous rhythm track on a frame drum which randomly and organically aligns with the voice / viol / drone track. Whilst I'd never attempt anything like this in a Folk Club, or any other Designated Folk Context, I nevertheless think of it as being Folk for reasons of Zeitgeist and resultant aesthetic sensibilities which are as much the consequence of collective cultural circumstance as they are the individual experience of those circumstances. Folk and Free Improvisation were the Chamber Musics of my childhood and adolescence, and it seems only right to bring them together from time to time, for whilst I'd never do anything like this in a Folk Gig, I'd certainly do it in a Free Improv gig. That said, even in my more orthodox folk ventures, there will always be a significant amount of improvisation going on purely because my personal understanding of The Tradition of English Speaking Folk Song is of a phenomenon that was highly fluid and infinitely mutable, in which songs were constantly being remade and changed even from one singing to the next - not out of sloppy dabbling or failing memory, but because such a fluidity is integral to the mastery oral culture and the genre which Folk Song. That one may only stay on top of such improvisation through rehearsing your tits off is one of the supreme ironies of the craft; use it or lose it, as they say. In the collected & recorded annals of Folk Song, I see little evidence to suggest that it was ever any other way.

Again, I'm rambling again; I'm actually in the middle of a review I'm doing of the new HUX edition of Heavy Petting which already runs to over 1,300 words and I still haven't mentioned the music. Instead of getting down to editing, I procrastinate over here on Mudcat...

Word count: 621 (before editing).