This reminds me of religious changes in the C16th when belief became an intellectual assent to a credo. If 1954 is a closed door it's pernicious nonsense. Folk cannot be academic, it's oxymoronic to believe it can, all top down definitions will fail a bottom up form.

But then I don't accept folk music is a museum piece any more than classical music died with the nineteenth century. The atomisation of humanity didn't end with the railway and he gramophone.