Tell the same person they can draw freely on the untapped wells of their primal inner creativity and you'll probably end up with "let's all join hands and save the weasel".

Not at all! You're far more likely to get Echoes, Hibou, Anemone and Bear or The Revealing Science of God - real middle-class music born of real traditional process.

*

The point is that Folk as a concept / definition was hatched at a significant remove from the phenomenon it was trying to understand by those of a social class who couldn't cope with the idea that the master song-makers & singers of the lower orders were actually in full control of their own culture. Needs must they had to be innocent of its true meaning and significance, just as to early folklorists they were innocent of the paganism they were unwittingly perpetuating in their quaint seasonal rites and dances. Interesting that such Victorian Paternalism persists to a quite alarming degree in the way folk is perceived and presented to this very day - perhaps even more so in the dark underbelly of weirdlore where post-modern hauntological irony is often overlooked in favour of more earnest Frazerian perspectives.

As such, Folk is a theoretical construct that looks at the phenomenon it calls Traditional Music whilst demanding absolute authoritarian complicity from the practitioners whom it exploits in the consigning their hard work to the realms of anonymous process where the singer is only of value because of the songs they sing, not as creative artists in their own right. The VOTP CDs are classic example of this, where once treasured respectful LP collections of such individual masters as Harry Cox, Willie Scott, Sam Larner, Davie Stewart, John McDonald, Felix Doran et al are split up to favour taxidermy & taxonomy over ethnomusicology / ethnography as an academic perspective.

Please note, I am not anti-academic; it is thanks to academics who know more about more body than I ever will that I am alive right now to write this at all. It is also to academics and scientists that I defer with respect of the Cosmic Spirituality of the Material Universe that has inspired me during some very dark moments. But when it comes to music...

The willingness and complicitness of the old singers to participate in this colonial exploitation is down centuries of lower class servility and disempowerment - a continuity of feudalism in Western Culture going back to the Norman Conquest* and beyond in the ordered certainty Kipling celebrates in the patronising paean to feudal tradition that is The Land. Out of this is Folk constructed as a myth of proletarian culture tailored for bourgeois tastes and mores up to and including latter-day lefties who think The Land is a pamphlet for Socialist reform, and that Folk is somehow radical to that end too. But nothing, I fear, could be further from the truth.

It begins with Cecil Sharp hearing John England singing the Seeds of Love on 22.8.1903 and being so moved by the beauty of it, what does he do? He makes fecking parlour arrangement of it to entertain his upper class pals with that very evening. There's your Folk Revival right there - parlour arrangements of working-class music made for the entertainment of the upper-class whilst the very real and entirely feral business of Popular Music Making continues apace and unbroken since time immemorial.

Hardly the wonder these days Folk is anything but Trad; it's about the people who are making the music regardless of the idioms they are making music in - all of which begins to sound uncomfortably like a paraphrase of the 1954 Definition....

* For example, Delaval Hall in Northumberland has only come into the care of the National Trust in recent years. A mere ten years ago it remained in the hands of the same family (give or take a change of name as inheritance passed from the male to female line) since the lands were first granted by Duke William shortly after the Norman Conquest. This is England!