So what does Roud actually say on definitions.

Roud calls the chapter where he discusses definitions 'Is There Such a Thing as Folk Song Anyway'? That might be seen as a bit provocative.

Whatever your views on definitions, it seems to me that Roud's chapter is worth reading. He explains how the term 'folk song' was used between 1870 and 1900 by 'various individuals in England' to refer to the 'repertoires of song and styles of singing' which seemed different from classical (what in the USA they call 'Art') music and the commercial music of the day. For various reasons they set about 'collecting' material, and proselytising. Those collectors had specific views of what counted as 'folk', so their collections, Roud says, did not reflect the whole range of songs sung by working people, their actual musical practices. They were not interested in the context in which the singing took place. Their agenda was partly nationalistic (England had been accused of not having any 'native' music, and partly to some extent based on class sympathies).


Roud explains that a 'cultural survivals' theory underpinned much of the argument of the Victorian folklorists, an idea linked with what he calls a 'Romantic Nationalist' view that all cultures go through similar 'folk' stages. Sometimes, Roud suggests, people assume that anything 'vaguely "folky"' must be old, and is evidence of early stages, when this is unproveable.


This interest died out, though the singing did not, not entirely, until after the 2nd World War when there was a 'revival', drawing much inspiration from abroad, which is where the folk singer with guitar seems to come in (though American influences began earlier than this eg the banjo).


Starting after the 1960s there was a strong left-wing attack on the early collectors, who were seen as being bourgeois and self-interested. One David Harker is a key figures here.


Roud says all this gave rise to two things: 'folk song for use' and the 'burden of expectation'.


The label folk song for use refers to the fact/idea that people coming to folk song have often wanted to do something with it, have been involved in a 'movement', whether this was to foster national pride or to counteract the 'evil influences of pop music'. For Roud, this inevitably meant 'compromises to make the material more easily accessible, up to date and relevant to todays society'. Roud says here that both the Edwardians singing folk in evening dress and the guitars and denim (blush blush) of the post war generation were 'incongruous' but justified in terms of the need to spread the message. Maybe the adopted accents mentioned in this thread are examples of this incongruity? Maybe not.


The 'burden of expectation' problem, as described by Roud, is what gave rise to the 'bitterness' of attacks such as Harker's, when it was discovered that folk song's potential for furthering particular causes was less that had been hoped for.

Roud thinks that this 'burden' led to a) tinkering and b) people writing their own 'folk songs', thus wandering away from the ideal of 'authenticity'. I write as a person who for a short while imagined that Dirty Old Town was authentic folk music, whereas now I think it was a commercial piece and that it is about Salford. But I still like it.

You can see that there may be problems in defining 'folk' in such a way as to include Dirty Old Town and Child Ballad Number One, which Heylin's Spectator review moans has such a low Roud number.

Roud than makes some claims of his own. For him, for example, 'there was not been a pure oral tradition for at least 500 years, not least because most folk songs owe their continued existence to their regular appearance in print'. He also comments that many songs later recorded as 'folk songs' were written by professional or semi-professional song-writers and poets. He then makes what for me is the crucial remark in terms of Roud's definition of 'folk'. He says:


"But what matters is that, of all the songs available at any given time, the ploughboys, milkmaids, miners and weavers took hold of some, and liked them enough to learn them and sing them, to make them their own and pass them on, and this makes them well worthy of our notice"


This point about learning it, singing it, making it their own, and passing it on, seems to me to be crucial in Roud's 'use' definition.


It certainly is not a simple matter of Roud stating that 'pop' music is 'folk' just because one person does an open-mike version of it.

Roud explains his thinking further:

'It is not our purpose here to discuss whether any of the modern styles {by this he means eg folk=rock, singer-songwriters} are 'folk' but what we are doing, in effect, is to reclaim the word from all its additions and accretions, to get back to something approaching what the Victorians and Edwardians meant by the word, but with additions and corrections of our own based on a re-interpretation of the evidence from their time.'

Roud also emphasises the 'process' whereby folk songs are created: again, for him the passing on of a song seems crucial.


However, Roud questions whether one definition can hold for 'all time'. He questions whether the historical narrative should be the same for different countries, whether it should be the same for Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and Ireland as for North America and New Zealand. This makes sense to me. The cultural contexts look different.


He therefore refers to his own definition/s as being 'attempted' suggesting an awareness that people coming later may see things differently as a result of their own context, and also, for me, expressing a certain amount of modesty.


So, for example, he says that many of the early conclusions about the origin of a song were speculative because 'we do not know where many of the tunes came from'. He gives Child as an example of an 'origins' theorist, saying he started a fashion for believing that folk songs came from the medievalk minstrel era because 'it was this aspect that gave the material its particular character, and also gave the ballad importance in the literary world'. This makes sense because in his day job Child wrote books about Geoffrey Chaucer who was 14th century. Child was a 'philologist'.


{It's a pity, perhaps, that Roud does not delve into the racialist thinking underpinning early editions of the American Journal of Folklore (eg Vol 1 No 1 1888). Thinking went beyond 'national' folk cultures.}


Then Roud gives a statemtn about his definition(Not his definition):
'..it must be clearly stated that the key component of the definition of 'folk song' in ths book is that it is the process through which songs pass in the brains and voices of ordinary people which brands them as 'folk'. Therefore, songs which the ordinary people have adopted as their own, regardless of origin, constitute in some way or another their collective voice and are 'folk songs'.

...'It is not the origin of a song which makes it 'folk' but what the 'folk' do with it.

Roud also suggests that maybe it not any one characteristic that should be crucial, but that it might be a matter of degree.

As already discussed on this thread, this definition is controversial and will not please everybody. It may exclude some work that some people strongly believe should be counted as 'folk'.

But I think we ought at least to pay Roud, who has produced a fascinating and carefully evidenced book, the courtesy of trying to deal with his ideas about definition as they are, and not over-simplify them.

Was it on this thread that somebody quoted Wittgenstein on language games?

NB Sandman: I can see where you are coming from, but there's a lot of stuff labelled folk in some contexts that I might not listen to for free on aesthetic grounds, especially medieval ballads in a language I can barely understand in print and no doubt would not understand at all if 'oral', but I can see that football songs that emerge from the terraces might be a fruitful source of stuff I might generally be happy to label folk. Drunken group sing-song activity: seems traditional enough to me. And 'You'll never walk alone' seems a good example. Pity nobody set the offside rule to music: that would make a good folkloric textual study.