"About which, I am sure, nothing further can be said"
Depends what your interests are and exactly were you are involved in folksong
If you are just out to listen to and sing a few songs, and you've found a venue that satisfied your needs - sure - it doesn't matter a rat's ass how you define what you do.
If you want to attract new people to what you are doing and you think 'folk music' is important enough to promote and worth passing on, you have to have at least a vague idea of what you mean by the term, otherwise you may as well just call what you do 'sing music' or some such term.
A grocer doesn't label his tins 'vegetables' if he wants to sell runner beans - simple as that.
Ireland's music is doing well because a group of enthusiasts established a starting point - a foundation, and worked from there.
The song side is still struggling to find its feet, though twenty odd years ago the singing scene was extremely promising, mainly due to the fact that there were still a fair number of the older generation of singers, Tom Lenihan, Eddie Butcher, Joe Holmes, Mary Anne Carolan.... to sit with and listen to - the high point of the Willie Clancy Schools was always Friday's singers concert and extended singing session, which were probably the most memorable for people like myself, and back then Topic Records did a magnificent job in making their singing available to a wider audience.
The interest in singing doesn't appear to have kept pace with the music scene here, though there are signs of a number of excellent young singers coming on to the scene.
What we have here are a largish number of 'singing circles' - anything goes sessions which appear to rise or fall on the standard of the singers involved, other than that, there appears to be no other central force holding them together.
We attended an excellent one of these last week in Kinvarra, where the standard was generally high and the songs nearly all fell into the category 'traditional' - we will go to as many future ones as we can manage, even though it means a 2 hour + journey and probably an overnight stay - if the singing had been otherwise we probably wouldn't bother and put the evening down to a convivial evening among nice people - no more.
As far as definition proper goes, 30-odd years ago we set out to record older singers; not just their songs, but the information that would allow us to put the songs, stories and music into some sort of context in order to understand how and why they were made and what part they played in our social history and culture - we didn't do too badly as far as it goes.
It turned out that the existing definitions, though flawed and very much in need of repair, worked quite well as a setting-out point.
The problem with Blandie, Harker et al... they seem to have adopted the old building trade adage that 'it's far easier to pull down something somebody else has built than to build something yourself'.
They are more than happy to flippantly pass off the work of others without putting something in its place - if Blandie has actually done any research work he appears to want to keep it to himself, and he seems not to even consider the work of others.
I find his destructive put-down attitude both destructive and deeply insulting.
What we've done with traditional singers (I even hesitate to use the term in his presence) doesn't make us right by any means, but at least we've put it to the test with traditional (that awful term again!) singers.
Jim Carroll