Currently enjoying one of its periodic revivals in mainstream rock circles, folk music is arguably more chic and cutting-edge today than at any time since Woodstock. Witness the praise lavished in recent years on Fleet Foxes, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver and other bright young things with acoustic instruments and amusing facial hair. Alas, there was little cutting-edge innovation or left-field glamour on display at Cambridge, with even fewer of the genre’s big crossover names on the bill than usual. After 44 years, the local council team behind Britain’s longest-running music festival continue to play to folk’s defiantly traditional, twigs-in-the-beard heartland.

Which is admirable, on one level, but not very exciting. Cambridge veterans, including Martin Simpson and Paul Brady, were rapturously received, but stayed firmly within the festival’s dowdy Anglo-Celtic comfort zone. Likewise the banjo-plucking, accordion-squeezing trio Máirtin O'Connor, Cathal Hayden, and Séamie O’Dowd played a warm-blooded but fairly generic show. There were also foot-stomping headline sets by Liverpool’s Zutons, whose pub-band singalongs proved entirely devoid of charm or subtlety, and Galway’s Saw Doctors, whose cheery grins and beery chants were rendered all the more disturbing by the singer Davy Carton’s resemblance to Bosnian war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic.

Not that the weekend was entirely without star quality. The Memphis soul legend Booker T. played some gold-plated R&B on Saturday, just as a torrential downpour flooded the site outside, triggering a crush in the main marquee. On Sunday, as the sunshine returned, the colourfully clad Afro-funk diva Oumou Sangare also proved to be an all-singing, all-dancing highlight.

Jon Boden of Bellowhead perked up the crowd too, with several lively fiddle- playing performances under various guises across the weekend — one of Cambridge’s finest traditions, which other festivals would do well to copy. But even award-winning young stars of the folk scene, such as the English minstrel Jim Moray and the Irish retro-jazz rockabilly chanteuse Imelda May displayed more energy than originality.

The cowboy-hatted country-rock diva Lucinda Williams began her Sunday night set with an attack of nerves, scrapping her first song after reacting badly to the BBC cameras. Thankfully the triple Grammy-winner soon recovered to deliver a full set of bittersweet ballads in warm, rich, bourbon-soaked tones. This was the handsome finale to a generally pleasant weekend, but hardly a persuasive advert for folk music as a living, breathing, relevant musical force.

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