Dead? How can it be be dead when Mark Ratcliffe is presenting a new Folk show on Radio 2? Shame he's not doing it with The Boy Lard though - well I remember the Folkier aspects of their Radio 1 show with Bernard Wrigley, the History of the Strawbs and features on Morris Dancer of the Week. Anyway, check it out...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/mark-radcliffe-adds-folk-to-radio-2-roster.html

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The problem for you Blan-whoever-you-used-to-be is that the 1954 definition is basically right (could do with a little fine tuning) and culturally neutral.

Balls. It's born of Upper Class English Colonialism. How on earth is that Culturally Neutral? It's as biased as it is patronising & condescending.

Your "definition" if that is the word for it would leave Peruvian nose flutes (or aborigine chant or whatever) as not folk music

Do I have a definition? Not sure if I do. Music is what it is - it doesn't need defining, just observing & respecting. Peruvian Nose Flute music is Peruvian Nose Flute music - why does it have to be folk as well? I've got shelves of ethnomusicological field recordings and very few of them use the term folk. Some do, granted, but it really is quite irrelavant to (say) Ritual New Guinea Flute Music or Mauritanian Griots or Madagascan Fiddle Music or Albanian Kaba laments. To say these musics are somehow folk because of some ghastly set of prescriptions hatched as Holy Writ in some ivory tower by a bunch of quasi-religious aristocrats and clung onto zealously by the fundamentalist faithful ever since is utter nonsense.

which is plainly ridiculous while admitting Mumford and Sons which is equally ridiculous.

Having never knowingly heard Mumford & Sons I couldn't possibly say.

And while I hate Sweeney O'Pibroch's pretentious use of things like a kaossilator on (say) the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens

Never sung Sir Patrick Spens in my entire life, though earlier on today I was using the Kaossilator for looping drones, Jew's Harp and pocket trumpet on King Orfeo. How on earth is that pretentious, Richard? Untypical maybe, I grant, in Folk circles anyway, but it's just what comes naturally to me, just as plagiarising Martin Carthy ballads comes naturally to you.

by your "definition" it would not be folk whereas it obviously is.

I've no problem calling it folk because folk is nothing if it isn't FORM and IDIOM. Amongst tons of other things Folk Form & Idiom consists of drones, modes and a studied unnatural obsession with traditional balladry - all of which I have in spades. Any accompaniment of such balladry is entirely relevant - be it an English Concertina or a fiddle or a banjo or guitar or a laptop computer or an Indian pocket trumpet looped through a Korg Kaossilator with mountains of FX thrown in for good measure.

Would I do this in Folk Club? No. But I do it at home & on-line & in more 'experimental' performance contexts where a ballad or two goes down a lot warmer than even an electronic shruti box does at a folk club. It's more than once I've had some mithering folkie coming up to me saying 'As a purist I find your use of electronic drones deeply offensive' or how dare you use a Turkish fiddle and Indian harmonium to accompany English Folk Song. Of course self confessed purists know fuck all about musical realities. Fact. If they did, they wouldn't be purists.

I wonder - are you a purist too Richard? Or just a Righteous Folk Puritan? WAV-like in your wonky prescriptions of how it ought to be, rather than just out there delighting in how it is...

1954 Folk isn't dead because it never existed in the first place. The Revival Continuum, OTOH, does exist. It stetches from the night of August 22nd 1903 when Cecil Sharp performed his parlour arrangement of Seeds of Love right through Fairport, Pentangle, Mr Fox, The Wicker Man Soundtrack to the myriad folk musicians & singers both great & small, straight & weird, out there doing their own thing in their own way today.

2012 Folk is alive & well & amazing; 2013 Folk will be even better.