I suppose we've all been in a folk club, heard songs accompanied by strumming, a mouth organ, a squeezebox of some sort, a tinkly mandolin, bones, spoons or a bodhran and thought we were listening to folk music. Or we've been to a "folk gig" replete with 150-decibel PA. Ha! Every genre of music I'm familiar with is subject to a load of mucking about with. Call it experimentation if you like. The mucking about is either to your taste or it isn't. I love classical music but I can't stand that 12-tone stuff. Trying to define folk song is like trying to put the damn thing in aspic. The very concept of a definition requires that you delineate boundaries. In simpler times when recording was difficult and those instruments were either not used or even invented, and singers weren't roving around the country doing "gigs" as much as they do now, there was perhaps a real heart-of-the-matter folk music that lived in communities. With the best will in the world, you're not getting that back. Like classical, pop or jazz, it has to move on. Instead of lamenting that inevitability, we should be grateful to the Vaughan Williamses, the Bert Lloyds, the Alan Lomaxes and the Ewan MacColls of this world, no matter what their flaws, for recording it, writing it down and archiving it for us, or just putting it to the fore lest we forget. As it's Wednesday, and as such I'll be cracking open a bottle ce soir, I'll raise a glass to Jim for his part in that. Maybe folk music is just a sort of spirit or a sentiment hovering over our kind of music. Indefinable...

I know what I like.

I don't need no definition.

I don't need no thought control.