BTW. joely, in regard to:

The point is, folk music is a catagory of music. It's not how old it is."...I actually tend to agree..but I have a LONG list of tests to apply to music beyond the age thing...There are some songs in the database by one Craig Johnson, which you'd SWEAR were old, it you didn't know better...he just wrote stuff with that 'feel'...

try working backwards...take some songs that almost anyone who has any knowlege of the genre' would call 'folk'...undisputed folk songs..now, make some lists of what they have in common...WHY did they get called 'folk' in the first place? ..you get certain tune styles, subject matter, cultural attitudes, modes of transmission, status of the composer(s), whether the composer is known, etc., etc..LOTS of things..it's like deciding whether a society is democratic or not...it is NOT a short list, and a number of countries call themselves 'democratic', that we might just not agree about..so...*shrug*