I wondered how long it would take.

Sorry Jim. Folk clubs have been part of, ironically enough, that evolution you keep wittering on about. There is nothing proscribed when it come to folk. It's a subjective term.

Stop telling usability bloody rules. I've been going to folk Cubs almost forty years and the only time I have ever come across such twaddle has been here on Mudcat, mainly by you. I've seen MacColl many times in his later years and heard him sing combinations of traditional and contemporary songs he and Peggy wrote, and I doubt a single person in the place thought "Oh, I wonder if that's folk?"

I know what folk is, everybody on here knows what folk is and the fact we may have different explanations just proves that folk is a process. The irony of a few weird beards trying to carve a living process in stone back in 1954 would be worthy of a comedy song in its own right. The snag is, you'd have to know about it to find it funny and I doubt many outside of these threads give such tosh a second thought, or even care.

It's music. It's a living tradition. It evolves. In two hundred years time, Neil Innes songs will be used to explain social values in the 1960s. (My Pink Half of the Drainpipe springs to mind.)

In respect for Les's plea. "I enjoyed that folk club because... We kicked the folk police out and enjoyed an evening of folk, with our waistbands firmly down near our waists."