[QUOTE 3194551, member: 1314"]Why not define 'folk music' instead of shouting 'cock'. You said it first. And I threw in a few ideas as to what I think folk music is.
What is 'folk music'? I guess defined here it's just a bunch of twee peeps who booed Dylan when he went electric. You haven't given an alternative cversion as to what 'folk music' is.
Old Unreconstructed White Men in Power, that's the problem. They still define the thing. Enjoy Joan Baez all, as that's who they want(ed) to sleep with, and therefore she's been endorsed by them.[/QUOTE]
CoG, there's a certain idea of folk music that has connections to hegemonic power, certainly (the Cecil Sharpe kind of tradional English music ideal). But there's always been living folk traditions that had little to do with those kinds of collectors and categorizers. My friends who play Old Time music (see above) learn their songs from older musicians who themselves learned them from old men in their day - there is a living lineage. That's one kind of folk. And then there's people who take folk idioms and do something new with them: write new songs, or innovate stylistically. And this is probably true in any country or in any folk tradition.
But this doesn't mean folk music is anything played by folk. It has come to have certain categorical boundaries, the same way that reggae, rock, blues and whatever have developed categorical boundaries - even though those boundaries are always fuzzy and the closer you look at them, the harder they are to define precisely in any particular case. But
@ianrauk is right in the end - there are things that aren't folk and The Buzzcocks aren't - contrast with The Pogues doing 'Dirty Old Town'. You might as well say that The Buzzocks are blues. Or reggae. They aren't those things either.
