Thanks for your input guest - sorry, but I feel I must disagree with most of it
Your argument may well describe what the clubs became, but they certainly didn't start out like that, not the ones I became involved with anyway
There was an element in what you describe in my first club, run by the Liverpool Spinners - a mixture of popularly performed folk songs and a social gathering.
I was a member for a couple of years and had just about had my fill of 'Fried Bread and Brandy' when they booked MacColl and Seeger, and I was introduced to an entire new world - a mixture of articulately presented traditional songs and (particularly) ballads alongside contemporary songs made on traditional forms.
I moved to Manchester and became part of the Terry Whelan, Harry Boardman, Tom Gillfellon, Teri Griffiths, Dave Hillary scene - a varied mixture of traditional songs that could knock your socks off.
By the time MacColl asked me to join the Critics Group I was an addict for life - not on the scene but on the songs - the social bit was an added bonus which you could take or leave.
MacColl, Lloyd and the pioneers all came to the music, very much influenced and inspired by McCarthy refugee, Alan Lomax
When he arrived in Britain Ewan and Bert were singing everything, including American songs that had been popularised by the material shipped in by Ken Colyer that set off Skiffle craze.
Lomax banged their heads together and pointed them at their home-grown folk songs, largely those collected by the BBC a few years earlier
What, Lloyd MacColl and others inspired became the serious and totally dedicated side of folk song
It produced new songs and new approaches to and uses of the old songs but it never really lost sight of their belief that Folk songs were the workers voice - The Voice of the People'.
There is a strange attitude that says you cannot be serious about your music and enjoy it at the same time
I'm working on a talk I'm giving in a few weeks and I'm using this quote by MacColl which answers that attitude for me perfectly - it's from an interview we did with him in in 1978.

"Now you might say that working and training to develop your voice to sing Nine Maidens A-milking Did Go or Lord Randall is calculated to destroy your original joy in singing, at least that's the argument that?s put to me from time to time, or has been put to me from time to time by singers who should know better.
The better you can do a thing the more you enjoy it. Anybody who?s ever tried to sing and got up in front of an audience and made a bloody mess of it knows that you?re not enjoying it when you?re making a balls of it, but you are enjoying it when it?s working, when all the things you want to happen are happening. And that can happen without training, sure it can, but it?s hit or miss. If you?re training it can happen more, that?s the difference. It can?t happen every time, not with anybody, although your training can stand you in good stead, it?s something to fall back on, a technique, you know. It?s something that will at least make sure that you?re not absolutely diabolical
The objective, really for the singer is to create a situation where when he starts to sing he?s no longer worried about technique, he?s done all that, and he can give the whole of his or her attention to the song itself, she can give her or he can give his whole attention to the sheer act of enjoying the song."

For me, our traditional songs are a vital part of our culture; performing them and listening to them has always given me enormous pleasure and I will be eternally grateful to the club scene that gave me the opportunity to do so - I wouldn't know they existed without them.
The clubs were set up to make these songs accessible to everybody - I only hope they survive to give future generations the same opportunity and pleasure they gave me
If I want to hear pop songs droned out by different performers 'just there for the craic' I can nip along to the local karaoke session
If people wish to offer a workable re-definition of the term "folk" they need to do so rather than saying "it is because I say it is" - that's just ill mannered boorishness.
I don't believe folk music is dead because it's a thing of the past any more than I believe Dickens or Shakespeare have had their day
They are all a part of our rich, vatal heritage and they all have something to say to us about ourselves
Long may they all thrive and prosper
Jim Carroll