I agree, Ron. Personally I'm suspicious of any romanticisation of The Tradition: This notion that a process existed which somehow created the songs, that the talent lay with the singers not the writers, and that's therefore where reverence is due. That's wrong. The songs were created by talented people who had something to say, just as songs are today. The bad ones never got handed on. The good ones were, and occasionally they got better in the process, more often they got more confused and corrupted. Words were lost, tunes were simplified, floating verses added to muddle the listener. Many trad songs you hear on records or in clubs today are actually quite poor in pure song terms if you stop to examine them (though there are many that are pure gold). Sometimes spoiled ones were or are rescued by talented singers and revitalised, and then of course credit is due - but it was only worth dong that if the song still had something worth rescuing - and if it did, that's down to the original writer, not those who've mussed it up over the ages, and made it need revitalising!

But Jim's definition is valid and well recognised. So is yours. But they're not at all the same thing. Hence why we now have to bow to the inevitable, drop the word, and find new terms that say what we each mean.