" often working class people who have their own stories to tell.
strikes me - you wouldn't know where folksong comes from if you had a bloody road map."
Yes they do Al, and they made songs to tell those stories - that's why we call them 'folk songs'
You have no right whatever to claim that my view is romanticised in any way.
We collected our songs on rat-infested unofficial Traveller sites in London - the people living on them, some of whom made songs which reflected their lives on those sites.
We included in our collections, masses of information of their lives and those of their forbears.
We sat for 20 years with Walter Pardon, a jobbing carpenter from farming stock living in somewhat bleak East Anglia.
Over the same period we worked here, in the West of Ireland where they scraped a living from poor soil filled with rocks.
Many of the songs the songs they gave us were made here at either side of a Famine that wiped out over a million people and drove another million from home - thanks to British Landlords, this area was one of the worst hit..
There is no time for ******* romanticism when that is the type of
information you are dealing with.
How hard was your folk-club hit during the bad times when the songs you sing were being made?   
Please don't tell me what my attitude is towards the songs I have sung and researched for the best part of my life - you haven't got the slightest clue, and you appear not to be interested enough to find out.
"he doesn't get it. he'll never get it!"
I was going to say that about you Al - you beat me to it.
As I was once told by a young Liverpool lady far above by amorous ambitions and experience "Come back when you've got hairs on it"
"Even when the genesis of their copyright was traditional!"
MacColl and Seeger were two of the most generous people I ever met with songs they made.
Songs that were published in collections were usually copyrighted by the publisher, but they received virtually nothing from the several hundred they made between them, with very few accidental exceptions.
I remember commenting to them when Dave Harker published 'The Big Red Songbook', which included several of their songs without having bothered to ask their permission.
Ewan's reply was "the songs were made to be circulated, not sold - why should he ask our permission to do our job for us?"
"ONE club, twenty or more years ago"
The ignorance and indifference of which is being witten here in tsunamis.
It was not about not knowing Walter as an individusl - it was about the fact that an organiser of a folk club had no knowledge of folk song whatever - it could have been Martian music under discussion.
The club concerned was unaware of any of the dozen or so singers or songs given as an example of what Walter did.
The club concerned was one that had once been on the list of possible guest-sharing for many years, but had changed hands.
Give us a break Bryan and stop trying to defend something tat should be indefensible from a club calling itself 'folk', but whch now seems to be common, if not the norm
"how is your definition of any meaning, much less value?"
Lass value that what Lighter - you have put up nothing to compare it to.
There are a hundred or so books on our bookshelf that giv it validity - wheer are yours to validate your non-definition?
"My point is that the state of folk clubs in the UK is not as you describe it."
Seems it is Bryan - just thumbed though lists of English Clubs - nearly all monthly where they used to be weekly (isn't yours monthly?) and everything from heavy metal to music hall - very little concession to folk song proper and a massive reduction in numbers couldn't find many more than half a dozen in the London area that remotely lived up to the description 'folk'
If th club scene is so healthy, why are we arguing whether it is reasonable to expect folk song wen you turn up ast a folk club, are you another one of these people who believe the term meaningless - remind me to strike Lewes off my list of 'keepers of the flame'.
"You still haven't responded to my post of 02 Sep 14 - 01:13 PM."
You have't responded to most of the points I have made other than to distort what I have actually said.
If you mean " None of the songs they have written fit the 1954 definition" yes I have
I said that nobody goes to a folk club waving a copy of '54 demanding that they adhere to what it says, me, least of all.
All, and many more write songs using folk forms - that is all I have ever asked of a club - it has been my stated position from day one of these arguments.
I expect to hear folk songs at folk clubs, but am more than happy to hear songs created in the folk style
I don't believe them to become folk songs until they leave the confines of the folk clubs, but that's another argument.   
There's nothing subjective about this - one of the great arguments in the past has been "I know a folk song when I hear one" - insufficient as a definition, but helpful nevertheless.
      


"The Singers Club and Court Sessions seem to have got round the problem by not saying very much on the label at all."
The reputation of The Singers Club and its two main residents was already well established before I became involved - that reputation was based on folk song, particularly ballads.
The organisers adopted a deliberate policy of creating knew songs using fol songs as a pattern.
People came in the numbers they did because knew what they would hear on any given evening
"Not true Jim, you stopped going 14 years ago"
Not true Brian.
I started goig to folk clubs at the beginning of the 1960s and stopped going regularly around the end of the 1990s, though by that time I had confined my visits to a couple of clubs - earlier I often managed three clubs a week - the London scene then gave me that choice - no longer.
I continued to go spasmodically on visits to family and friends in he U.K., which would include London, Liverpool, Somerset, Birmingham and Lowland Scotland.
I make that longer than forty years overall, but who's counting?   
You apparently.
I've not included the other activities which involved me in folk song.
"So are the songs of MacColl or Seeger or Pete Smith...... "
Who said they are "folk songs?
I didn't, and among those I knew, neither did they.
They are songs which have been made using folk song patterns
Lighter:
"How do we get everyone to agree on this?"
We have a workable definition which is acknowledged by virtually all those working in folksong - enough documented proof of this to fill a library - of which there are many in existence - 2 national ones in Dublin alone.
The acceptance of the existing definition lies in the fact that it hasn't been seriously challenged and certainly not replaced, though it is widely acknowledged that it is in need of improvement.
The exception to this lies in the clubs, which appear to have abandoned any form of definition and put on whatever the they wish and call it folk song - sharp practice, as far as I'm concerned.
Jim Carroll