"The answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter a jot."
If you are involved only as a singer or musician, of course it doesn't matter.
If you are involved in the other implications of the music, it matters a lot.
If you are involved in both, you have to do a double-take when moving from one to the other.
MacColl, Lomax, Lloyd, Mike Seeger, Bob Thomson.... and a whole bunch of others had a foot in both camps.
Many of us came in as singers and broadened our interests to both -
the clubs were a door into a whole new genre of culture for us, that door has pretty well closed now.
Even as a point of simple logic - our music has been documented more widely than virtually any other musical form, yet that documentation no longer applies to the clubs - acculturation has taken place with one cultural (documented) form being displaced by another basically undefined and undocumented form.
Surely, from the point of view of advancement of the music, this cannot be right.
Jim Carroll