One of the problems of all this of course is that the term 'folk' is applied to songs that bear no resemblance to folk songs in any shape or form whatever - the tired old 'I ain't never heard a horse sing' excuse being put forward as a replacement for an argument.
I take Steve's point about attaching definitions "freezing the folk process", but if, as I believe to be the case, that process is dead, it is frozen anyway and all we can do is assess it in retrospect.
I have yet to be persuaded that that process is still a living one.
Our folk songs recorded and reflected the aspirations of entire communities, not tiny groups of specialists who self-consciously met once every whenever to listen to each other sing.
They arose from the experiences of those communities, served them for a time and disappeared when they had served their purpose, other than those few that were caught like butterflies by collectors and archived or published.
They were part of those communities social history - a ground-level view of their everyday lives.
The universality of their themes allowed many of them to take root wherever they landed and become an expression of lives there.
I would love to believe that this is still happening, but I can't see how it possibly can.
The oral tradition no longer exists to cater for such creations, technology has guaranteed that they are stillborn, fixed in the form the creator gave them, and more importantly, the sole property of the creator.
I know it was MacColl's dream that the folk song tradition could be used to create new songs to express the lives of 'ordinary people', (whoever they were) - it simply didn't happen, or not to the extent he believed it could.
The revival, in Britain at least, seems to have imploded into a dwindling number of somewhat eccentric specialists somewhat remote from the world in general - it serves itself rather than the communities it once represented.
The songs have lost their 'folkness' inasmuch as they are now the personal properties of their creators unless any of our singer/songwriter friends are happy to declare they are happy to relinquish any rights to their creations - (long, pregnant silence, I suspect).
One of the main practical points I raise has been carefully shuffled around - that of ' where do we go from here?'
I can now turn my radio or television on virtually seven nights a week and find a programme on folk song or music, ranging from recorded and filmed pub sessions to archive selections of past performances to intelligent analytical discussions on various aspects of both.
One of the first programmes we watched when we first moved over 15 years ago was entitled "Has Traditional Music Sold Out?"
I can go out four nights a week and listen to traditional song and music sung and played to a passable to an excellent standard by participants aged from old enough to drink (mostly) to wrinkleys like myself.
Thousands of youngsters are now taking up traditional music, guaranteeing its survival for at leas another two generations.
All this was achieved by a few people concentrating on what they meant by folk/traditional and using that to build a foundation for the future.
Is that happening elsewhere?
Jim Carroll