At the beginning of the 20^th century a few collectors of what were then called “living antiquities” began writing down ballads and other folk songs. Mackenzie, the first English Canadian folklorist, asserted that to find a real folk singer one had to look for a person of at least 80. The early folklorists were convinced they were gathering the last remnants of the genre. By mid century the young activists of the Left were assembling a body of music they called folk, that included traditional songs they inherited from the folklorists, new songs by writers operating outside the margins of the pop music industry, and music from a variety of non-Canadian traditions. They, more than anyone else, created folk music as a component of popular culture. By the early 60’s this body of work had acquired a dynamic of its own and was spreading among a new generation mainly unaware of its roots. For the next four decades folk music has evolved, growing and mutating, picking up audiences as it did. Today folk music is pervasive, eclectic, and inclusive. The folklorists were wrong. When Great Big Sea recorded Lukey’s Boat on their first record and sold several hundred thousand copies of it, it reached more ears than ever heard it by an out port pier. The vision of a “people’s music” hatched by a few thousand socialists 50 years ago has become a reality. Yet not in the way they planned. Folk music and the organized workers’ movement never acquired the organic connection envisioned by the left, and while a real link between many folk music artists and an array of social movements has existed and continues to exist, folk music also has evolved into the minor leagues of the pop music industry. Folk music has become the official opposition of the mainstream of the popular music industry- in it but not of it. Ambiguous, contradictory, and plain indefinable, folk music in English Canada continues to grow.