Popular is Popular on account of the conditions which determine the collectivity of the musical process, if not their corporeal realisation which must, in all cases, be down to the individual and their answerability to the wider community. If the Folk of Folk Music doesn't = humanity, then what else can it possibly mean? Both the Folk Myth and the 1954 Shibboleth depend on it! This is born, I might add, of a cultural condescension which defines the Folk Myth anyway, and to widen those parameters beyond the class-ridden assumptions of the early entirelybourgeois revival (however so redeemed by radical baby-boomers) is to turn the tables rather on a rather noxious circumstance.

So, if anyone's paltering here, Michael - well it ain't me. By regarding them as profoundly different you are missing the human essence common to both. Where they differ is in terms of idiom; both are expressions of respective musical traditions which determine what they are. The Folk Myth is the conceit that it was ever any different and that we have lost something as a consequence. I don't buy into that - I never have & I never will.