..again.

Me too Michael. When I came here as a complete no-nuthing, I followed Sean's posts -alongside those of others here of course- and have always found them perfectly lucid, rational, strongly argued and entertaining (I think what you find as "overstated" I see as something of the dramatic flourish of a storyteller expressing itself in prose form).

Does Folk Music need to be 'defined' and delimited strictly according to a very specific and limited set of rules? I don't think so, I think all one can ever say is: "Here is a body of work. These are some things we have observed pertaining to that body of work thus far, and these are our thoughts about those observations. Discuss." Nothing more concrete than than that.

Otherwise of course categorisation of sorts is necessary, we need to put that particular body of material in a folder labelled with some referent in order that we may discover it, explore it and enjoy it. But that referent should ideally be a term which allows for our evolving understanding of that to which it refers, rather than rigidly prescriptive. I think.