Folk is born of a human need for people to re-represent in poetic form (in the case of folk song) the things that move them rather than have somebody do the job for them.

I'm talking about Folk as an extraneous concept to the pure essense of the old songs born of working-class creativity which are exactly about the things you say they are, Jim. These songs weren't made as 'Folk Songs' - they weren't made to fit with the 1954 Definition or any other concept of folk - they made as idiomatic vernacular popular songs, pure and simple and entirely 'innocent' of folk. Folk, in the 1954 sense, is so much more than idiom, or even context, it is an ideology hatched in isolation from the very thing it claims to revere. It's complicated, because it's thanks to the diligence & hard work of the collectors that we have all this stuff anyway, but it's an antiquarian specialism of little interest to anyone outside of a very select scene of enthusiasts all a long way from the people who made the songs in the first place, or those who occupy the same social strata today.

In saying such things I'm not demolishing, attacking or dismissing anyone. It's just the way it is. No malice intended.