I do not think folk songs belong to anyone, Jim"
It ias the product of working people - that is an entire socliam group, not "someone"
The suggestion 'I don't like Mondays' came up quite early in this discussion
That is legally "owned" by Bob Geldof - where does that fit into your "I do not think folk songs belong to anyone"
You are about as consistent as anybody else here.
"We generally don't depend on definitions to understand or use words correctly."
We dio if we wish to talk to each other intelligently.
"exclude all non-chairs."
Nobody is suggesting anything like that
Back to Raggy's "definition" (sic)
"Folk music is not defined, it is a combination of listening and common sense."
That is a nonsense on both counts
It is defined - largely the argument has been whether the definition holds water
My common sense tells me that if I see a club advertised as a music club I go and take pot luck and have a right to expect nothing
If a club calls itself folk, I have a right to expect what it tells me to expect to some degree otr other
AS not a single individual has come up with a workable and agreed description of what I can expect to find in a folk club, I'm stuck with my former understanding - thousands of books on the subject, many hundreds of collections, over a century's research, a number of recordings you could fill St Pauls with to the roof - and thirty years of attending clubs advertised as 'folk'
MacColl was one of the first to set up a club - Peggy's autobiography puts it as 1956
He ran it until just before his death in 1989 - 43 years of consistency
That'll do for me.
If somebody came to me and said they were interested in finding out what folk song was, I could pull several hundred collections or analytical works off our shelves and say - "here' look for yourself"
I could play them many thousands of hours of examples all relating to one another to some degree and say - "here that's what it sounds like"
None of you people can - you can take them to one club and here an eclectic mix of musics, which may include folk song but, given some of the attitudes here, probably wouldn't
Your claim lacks consistency, it lacks proof and it lacks common sense.
You are selling a pig in a rapidly shrinking poke
By trying to please all of the people all of the time you are conning the people all of the time
Your idea of folk song lack logic and it lacks principle - and it's fucked up a folk scene that had all of those things
If it's all right with yuo, I'll stick with Shirley Collins, Ian Campbell and Walter Pardon
Jim Carroll