Shambles, please don't apologise, this is one of the most entertaining and thought provoking threads for some time, and that ,as I write it, seems to me to answer, or at least point to an answer to your question about singer/songwriters, their songs are rarely either entertaining or thought provoking.

Singer/songwriter has, I believe, become a self defining category, there are a whole raft of people, some of great talent, who write and perform their own work, but who we would never dream of putting in the s/s basket; Paxton, McTell, MacColl & Guthrie, for example. As Bert has said, s/s's are often so omphalistic and/or narcissistic that they fail to meet the basic purpose of a performance, ie to entertain, but fail to recognise their failure. Some of course become hugely successful commercially despite these traits, but then so is MacDonalds!

On the taxonomical side of things, I think you are missing Bill's point about exclusion. It is quite possible to define a condition, which in practice, can only be said with any degree of certainty to exist by excluding all other possibilities. Medicine is a prime field for this kind of exercise.

I am not a great fan of reductionism; but it is undoubtedly a useful tool in the right place, also the category we put something in will depend on our own world view as much as anything, and that inevitably changes with time, so yes, I believe that a structured taxonomy for "folk" music is of great help to most people most of the time, but that does not imply that the categories are or should be rigid. I would suggest that more understanding arises from discussions about the fuzzy overlaps than anything else. The issue of categories in Music shops is I think, a red herring, those categories are defined not to differentiate on any basis meaningful within the field, merely to maximise sales by often intentionally misleading.

Yes I think there is a mystique or magic which a song acquires, like a patina, with absorption into the folk process, for me it has nothing to do with age per se although a certain amount of time needs to have passed for it to occur; it may ultimately be indefinable except at an emotional level, but its real for all that.

I also remember the Ascent of Man, and agree totally about the danger of people who are absolutely certain they are right. Can't think of any Duck angles though!

Pete M