Folk is a thing of the past - I sing old Traditional songs to commune with a pastoral idyll, real or imagined. But even as a kid I remember a plethora of wildlife, bees & insects in the fields; happy harvests and tattie picking. And even as recently as 20 years ago I used to sit with my 12-year-old daughter watching RED squirrels in the woods of Durham. All long gone now.   

I was raised in the SE Northumbrian Coalfield and caught it pretty much in its death-throes, but even so it was real enough in terms of local history & folklore; my grandfather was invalided out of the pits aged 12, so something like 'The Colliers Rant' (which was old even when Bell published in in 1812) becomes a means to a far darker seance with the vanished cultural landscapes of my childhood.

Folk is born from a yearning for England's Pastoral Dreaming which is writ large enough in the old songs. It's always existed in reaction to the modern and found its place in the hearts of middle-class baby-boomers for whom the modern was anathema. Its key imagery was bucolic - from Liege & Lief to The Battle of the Field and all points between & beyond - until it became ashamed of its own image at some point in the 80s & cut its hair.

If I want modern, I'll listen to something else, but Folk to me is a comforting twilight realm of hoary lore fast vanishing in the sunset. Indeed, I would be very alarmed if I went to a singaround and DIDN'T hear some university lecturer singing an impassioned Painful Plough...