In my experience folk songs are 'extraordinary' - that is why they have been passed down and have survived for centuries.
Bert's idea of 'ordinary' songs for 'ordinary' people smacks to me of 'dumbing down' - the bland attracting the bland, so to speak.
As an 'ordinary' person, (lousy state education, brought up on various Liverpool housing estates, apprenticeship on the docks, work as electrician until retirement...... yattata yattata) I believe 'ordinary' people are quite capable of accepting and understanding anything that is made available. I was introduced to the works of Thomas Hardy by the very 'ordinary' jobbing carpenter Walter Pardon. To suggest that they/we are not capable of appreciating folk song proper is patronisingly insulting - after all, it was 'ordinary' people who made and perpetuated the folk songs and (97 verse) ballads in the first place.
Don
Dublin has 2 folk clubs (maybe not called such), The Goilín and he Clée Club; both specialising in what I would refer to as folk songs and corresponding more or less to their UK counterparts. I was in the latter on Wednesday listening to two Scots singers of (mainly) bothy songs.
'Ballads' (a throwback to 'the ballad boom' in the 60s and 70s), as you say, refers to the more popularised end of the folk repertoire plus the songs recorded by John McCormack... et al. The term also includes the song sheets (broadsides) that were sold around the fairs and markets, mainly by Travellers, right up to the 1950s (the best remembered one around here being 'The Rocks of Bawn'). It's worth remembering that if you ask the 'ordinary' man-in-the-street in the UK you are quite likely to be given 'Strangers in The Night' as an example of a ballad.
On the other hand, 50 Child ballad titles have been recorded over the last 40 years from source singers, including several, (Lord Gregory, Prince Robert, Young Hunting, The Maid and The Palmer, The Suffolk Miracle, Johnny Scott, The Demon Lover... etc) that have disappeared totally from the British traditional repertoire.
Jim Carroll