"It is the process of acceptance, oral transmission, adaptation and change that give songs their 'folk' identity, not their authorship."

So a song has to be appealing enough to the masses to fall into mass amateur imitations, much like a pop song such as Yellow Submarine? Albeit with the caveat that no-one remembers who wrote it, or what the *exact* words were when initially composed.

To use Folk as a noun dependent on those conditions, seems very much like the reification of a non-thing or abstract concept, into a thing that doesn't actually exist.