Firstly, I must say that I find the very existence of a 'World Council of Folk Music' amusing in the extreme...to me, it seems to be an anathema to the ethos of 'the community re-fashioning and re-creating the music' to have a World Authority to it.

That said, I do agree with their definition, although it doesn't bode well for the 'future' of folk music if you take it at face value. That's because the definition strictly excludes 'published' music that it taken verbatim from the source - there must be some alteration / evolution of the song for it to be folk.

You can easily imagine how this happened back in the day. With no records and hardly any sheet music, the 'common folk' learned music by ear, and sometimes they learned it 'wrong' or maybe deliberately changed it. Someone made a comparison to a meme upthread. Fair enough, that seems very reasonable. The 'good' songs survive (although in various mutated forms), and the 'bad' ones die out because nobody can be bothered to sing them.

But these days, if I write really good songs (which, I hasten to add, I don't), chances are, I'm going to try and get them recorded at some stage. If the songs are VERY good, they might end up on a CD bought in massive numbers, or on the radio. (Of course I understand that just because a song is on a CD or radio, it doesn't necessarily make it good - but bear with me...). But THAT means that when my millions of doting fans learn my songs, they learn them from the 'official' or 'proper' version. It doesn't change with time like a REAL folk song does, because if they play their rendition of the song to someone else, and that someone else decides that THEY'D like to play it too, they refer back to the original source to learn it...in this case, my platinum selling CD.

What you end up with is maybe 1000 people playing my song, but with no variations other than the ones imposed by different musician's limitations.

Now, there are guys at my local folk club who do write songs, and they're not on CDs, and not on the radio. So if I learn one of them, and play it to someone else, who then learns it from me, and so on and so on, then OK, there you have a bona fide folk song (or at least you will do in say 60 years if it lasts that long). But, the crucial question is, how many of these real new folk songs are in YOUR repetoire? I don't want to make too many assumptions, but I'd guess not many. That might be wrong - if it is, tell me!

So, my assertation is that folk music is a shrinking gene pool, because technology (CD's / radio / the internet) make mass dissemination of music so readily available. The folk process doesn't apply any more, and if a song must be subjected to the folk process to qualify as a folk song, then there just aren't going to be many new ones about.

That's my 2-penneth anyway.