"The discussion "What is folk" "
Whenever the subject comes up there is a wave of hostility - traces of it here.
I would have thought it possible to discuss this subject on a forum that styles itself as Mudcat does in a friendly manner - once again, I appear to have been proved wrong.
For me, the term folk is important - the existence of song, music and stories that have been created and passed on down the centuries, have remained anonymous virtually throughout the time of their existence is, to me, an interesting enough phenomenon to deserve drawing attention to as group distinct from the popular songs, classical creations and those made by known poets that are traceable and identifiable back to source.
The anonymity, constant adaptation and the subject matter of these songs makes them uniquely distinctive.
The process that once made them is now gone - songs are made, sung at the clubs, put on albums, published.... they remain largely unchanged and they are fixed at birth as being owned by their composers - they are compositions by Ewan MacColl, Eric Bogle, Jack Warshaw, Sandra Kerr.... all great songmakers in their chosen genre...... but they are not folk songs and they probably never will be because the folk mechanism no longer exists to pass them on in the way that they could take on a life of their own - they are all stillborn by their very nature.
Recently, I have become interested - obsessed even, with songs that have not entered the general folk repertoire, but were made locally by 'ordinary' (whatever that means) people, to record local events, characters, aspects of life..., survived, often for only a short period, then have disappeared when the subject matter that inspired them passed from the memories of the community.
The Travellers made them up to the 1970s, we've discovered probably near 100 of them made in this West of Ireland one-street town, dating back to the middle of the 19th century.
The represent the artistic creations of working people and as such, they are unique.
I have no problem with making new songs and singing them at folk clubs - songwriting is one of the great achievements of the Folk Revival 0-- without it, our clubs would have been little more than museums or butterfly collectors conventions.
When I was singing regularly, I had a repertoire of around 300 songs - about a third of them were contemporary songs created in the folk styles.   
Since I began to research and collect songs from the older generations - from farmers and land labourers, fishermen, Travellers.... I began to realise their importance, not just as entertainment, but as a massive body of our social history - historically, they are the voice of the voiceless - the "Folk" - I believe they important enough to be treated separately for what they are - way back in the 1830s, somebody came up with the term "folk" and, whether we like it or not, that's what we are stuck with.
It doesn't stop us liking and performing other genres of song or music, but if we want to discuss and pass on the information, we need to be clear about what we are talking about - it's crazy to have a term that is published and documented in great detail to mean one thing, yet which means something totally different in the "folk clubs".
They is a later development of the folk revival - when I first signed up to all this, I knew more or less what I would find when I went to a folk club - they did what it said on the tin.
Now I can, and have, walked out of a 'folk' club without hearing a folk song - I stopped going to folk clubs when that became a regular feature, and so did a lot of other people.
In those days, folk club evenings were weekly events - now they are mainly monthly.
The audiences reduced radically and their average ages increased - we stopped drawing in new people - I believe this was because the term 'folk' came to be used as a dustbin to cover anything any individual wanted it to be - the 'singing horses' took over the scene.
A major part of our collecting was to interview, sometimes at great length, the singers we recorded about how they felt about their songs and where they fitted into their lives and the lives of their communities.
Most of them sang other types of songs, earlier popular, music hall, Victorian Parlour Ballads, Country and Western.... - but they all distinguished the folk from the non-folk in some way or other - the "old" songs, the "come-all-ye's", even the "folk" or "traditional" songs.
Walter Pardon filled tape after tape describing how his folk songs were different from the rest of his repertoire.
Blind Travelling woman, Mary Delaney, recalled nearly 100 folk songs a
and ballad which she called "my daddies songs" - when we recorded her father, he knew about six - Mary was talking about a type of song - that was her definition.
She could have doubled her repertoire with the CandW songs she knew, but she refused becaus she said,"that's not what you are looking for - I only learned them because that' what the lads ask for down the pub".
It is a myth to suggest that he older singers didn't distinguish between one type and another - if they can do it, surely we can - it seems both common sense and good manners.
They gave us their songs because they thought they were worth preserving for whatthey were - they took a pride in them - so shoud we.
Sorry to have gone on for so long - a hobby horse of mine.
Jim Carroll