"None of us have the slightest idea what various people might have classified the original song as..."

Greg, I think you've hit the nail on the head with this. I reckon if they'd classified it as anything it would have been a "song" (as opposed to a potato or a truncheon, for example). I'd have thought the very notion of "folk song", is really an artificial construct that can only be applied to songs selectively and retrospectively by an almost mystical process (double reverse osmosis is my best guess) by those with an academic or cultural detatchment from the songs themselves. What gets in and what doesn't is based almost entirely on chance and circumstance (if Cecil Sharp hadn't heard his posh mate's gardener, we wouldn't necessarily have 'Seeds of Love' as one of our folk songs - oversimplification, but d'you get my drift?). When not chance and circumstance there's also a healthy dollop of the collector's prejudices, expectations and own tastes and preferences. The exception to this are people who are traditional singers (i.e. have learned songs aurally from family or community or work-grouping) who have, because of the nature of folk music in the post-folk era, been absorbed into the revival (which is arguably just about all we have left - the inevitable reduction of "folk" to a genre and the consequent impossible onslaught of anally retentive genre politics that goes with this).

Meanwhile, the magicians and alchemists of the 1954 conclave may have been a few things, but I doubt they were scientists.

Those who disagree with me are more than welcome to classify this post as a work of fiction. They may be right. I prefer to inhabit the grey areas...