Topic Records boss, David Suff, explained to me that our misunderstanding of the words ?folk music? has to do with a marketing conundrum - that "singer-songwriter" was too long a word to keep having to write out - but he also admitted that he wasn?t really sure.

The Turkish music scene has a better way of handling that. Their genre classifications are a bit different to Anglophone ones, but they have a term "?zg?n" (original) which means much the same thing as "singer-songwriter" - a snappy two-syllable word with no derogatory connotations. The genre isn't as popular as it was, but there was never a reason to be coy about the word - you'd find it labelling the bins in music shops.

It would have helped if an Anglophone could have invented something analogous back in 1954 as a simple non-pejorative term for things like the songs of MacColl and Leonard Cohen.