"why Dirty Old Town is a contemporary folk song while From Clare to here is not? "
Who said either was a "folk" anything - you are the one who attaches the label to newly written songs made using the folk techniques, not me
I beileve one uses folk techniques in its make up, while one is singer-songwriterish, but it's probably nit-picking and unimportant
Neither are folk songs
You keep talking about what you "can and can't" sing - you carry the rule-book, not me
This is basically the dishonesty of these arguments - you invent "rules" that people have to adhere to
Can you find anything I have written which says that
When MacColl, Seeger, did the Radio Ballads they based the music on folk styles - mainly, 'John Axon' used jazz forms - even well known jazz instrumentalists
Singing the Fishing - mainly folk forms, but slap in the middle - a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan
'On the Edge' - pop song techniques of the early 60s
One of the best evenings I attended in the early days was around the time MacColl was given a part in a television series, 'The Borderers' and invited the star, Ian Cuthbertson, along to the club to do a night of poetry and song swapping - half of the evening had very little to do with folk

A healthy folk scene can experiment in all directions - it can broaden its influences and horizons by doing so
We don't have a healthy folk scene (how many clubs again?)
The problem is that, as Observer indicated, the basis of o=the folk scene - folk song, has been edged out to make room for something else - that 'something else' has no identity because it has no homogeneity - anything goes and 'folk' has become meaningless.

The other thing that has gone seriously wrong is that it has returned to the very thing it was set up to escape from
We first took up skiffle to make our on music - a way for us all to express ourselves freely without having to wait till the industry decided what was to be the next 'flavour of the month'
What we did happened o a weekly basis and was spread around so wide that we could fill our week visiting different clubs if we wanted
Now people talkk about 'annual festivals' as being a substitute and the god-awful media 'folk-singer-of-the-year' often mediocre displays of 'excellence' as an aim


Will you please stop keep suggesting that I am making rules - I am not
I am suggesting that the folk scene bike has a bad puncture which needs repairing      
As a researcher I will endevour to be accurate when talking or writing about what I know to be folk song - if I ever forget what it is there are thousands of places I can go to remind me
As a singer and listener, I am quite happy to go home having heard enough folk or folk-based songs for the evening to have lived up to its original description - a few diversions don't matter too much as long as there are not too many for the objective to have been lost
When push comes to shove, it is folk song that matters - the enjoyment that comes with it is an essential bonus - the petrol that make it go

Hoot
We seem to be at cross purposes
The Empress of Russia events I am referring to were Thursday(I think) nights devoted largely to traditional singing
Jim