Folk music = music played by folkies.

But only in a designated folk context, like me wandering in a dream along the green lanes between Trunch & Knapton last week singing Butter and Cheese and All in the baking sunshine; part vagabond, part interloper, part tourist, part antiquarian (I was actually seeking the late medieval font cover in St Botolph's and it's queer carvings; a unique example I believe; SS Peter & Paul has a very fine 14th century roof), and total dilettante. What lurks along such byways is the notion that Folk Music is that which lingers and yet still invigorates; it is spectral in essence and ectoplasmic in manifestation. As such, it only exists for the faithful, be they happy medium or casual onlooker, or a bit of both as most Folkies tend to be, though I much rather prefer the term Traddy myself, as Folkie covers too wide a multitude of utter sinfulness.

But if I wandered into Saint Botolph's and heard the music of Mark E's YouTube links in the OP being played therein, I'd either take a pew and listen intently, or else take out me fiddle and join in, content that there is more cause to think of that sort of thing as being Folk Music than much of what I no longer hear in so-called Folk Clubs if only because life's too short to waste listening to old blokes wielding acoustic guitars and singing hits from their long vanished youth, which isn't bad necessarily, just not to my taste.

Often the idea of a music can be more compelling than the music itself. Gibb Sahib speaks of Folk Music as a process; such Free Improvisation is a process too - it begins, it interacts, it ends; it serves it's organic purpose and vanishes away never to be repeated least someone is on hand with a tape machine. Folk Song is like this too, organic, fluid, never the same thing twice, living and breathing in the liminal realm between Concept and Corporeality; each rendering as alike or as unalike as trees, grass or crickets* with the essence of the thing in the doing, the experience, the being there, the ceremonial excellence of performance.

We often talk here on Mudcat about the Folk Process, with many people feeling this is unique to Folk, the Orthodox Congregation of the 1954 Faithful. Thing is, I think the history of human music these last 50,000 years has been a struggle against process, because Process = Nature, and Nature is generally Bad for you. Nature is impulse, sin, death, disease, violence, suffering, winter, cold, dark, sorrowful, chaotic and unpredictable. Early Cultures in the UK made Very Big Monuments like Thornborough, Avebury and Stonehenge that were Bigger than Themselves and, by implication and perspectuve, Bigger than Nature too. These monuments sought order in the chaos of the natural world, they created perfect flat horizonsm they looked for patterns in the heavens, they perceived in the simplicity of arcs, circles, lines and elipses an Order which was entirely Unnatural and therefore Good.

Scroll on 50,000 years and many of us feel as we've taken it too far; the ordered blandness of the human world is utterly artificial and entirely uninspiring, so we might seek after a more Natural music, or Folk Music, in which Organic Process is integral, be it from one rendering of a ballad to the next, or simply by Improvising without pre-conception. The music is still Traditional, just that the potentials are entirely unpredictable in terms of a Chaos which some of us now perceive as A Very Good Thing, if only to get back to something which is all but lost to us. Music born of that principle, that yearning, is, I feel, Folk Music by default as it carries with it the very essence of the 1954 Definition - i.e.

(i) continuity which links the present with the past;
(ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group;
(iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.

I suppose what I'm saying here is that, if Mark E's OP links aren't Folk Music, then in all seriousness I don't know what is.

* Quoted by memory from the sleevenote of Alchemy by the Third Ear Band (EMI, Harvest 1969)