I say that at this point songs like Johnny B. Goode are folksongs

Well, Jimmy Wrinkle, they're certainly a non-horse song born of idiomatic tradition and subsequently adopted and processed accordingly; but the fact it exists in even more variations than Barbara Allan isn't enough to make JBG a folk song. And why would one want it to be? For sure, it can be a folk song - but only when sung by folkies: as I might have said earlier or elsewhere even when Jim Eldon performs a pop song it becomes Folk by dint of context & intention alone, but to call it a Folk Song on account of its adoption, process, nascence and adaption is, I think, specious in the extreme.

Call it instead a Traditional Song (a term which is, I would argue, tautologous) of the genus Rock 'n' Roll that has been adopted by Folkies and Classical players (I've heard extremely involved & intricate serial variations for string quartet) is by the by. Composers have used folk songs similarly - doesn't mean Vaughan Williams was writing folk music, but dear God, he was certainly processing it as part his tradition.

All musical Idioms exist in the flux of process. The nascence of a song is testimony to this & its variations thereafter but par for the course, especially in a more improvisatory context, such as the natural oral habitat of The English Folk Song Proper where things emerged differently every time and the collected evidences froze those instances in aspic - silenced as larks tongues!

The Folk Song idiom is hightly prized for its music purity but whether this the consequence of the erosion of the ages or just the mastery of the individual song makers is open (I hope) to debate. Remember, in their working lives these singers would have been masters of a dozen crafts, and just as I hear kids of ten masterfully peeling off everything from heavy metal licks to Irish jigs to Vivaldi sonatas, it ought not surprise us that these songs were made by masters too. Heavens, we even have the names of a few of them - George Bruce Thompson, Tommy Armstrong and James Armstrong to name but three - who composed perfect verse in the Idiom of Traditional Folk Song. They were not alone.

My position here is that Folk Song is a matter of idiom; the Tradition was the genre, rather than the songs per se. It's a case of seeing the wood AND the trees. We access an idiom through its works, and by a familiarity with those works we gain an understanding of that idiom, and however so long dead they still have the power to invigorate us on a level which, I suspect, is as intuitive as it is academic. I know a lot of very passionate folk song scholars - indeed, what would the revival be without them?

The Folk Charm is beguiling, but without an understanding of the natural habitat of Fok Song Proper we're limited to the taxidermy, which is far from flawless as act of pure ethnomusicology - which it wasn't in the first place. It is typified well meaning outsiders like Cecil Sharp made a parlour arrangement of a song he'd filched of his mate's gardener only a few hours earlier. Is that too part of The Folk Process I wonder?

This continues this to this day - all we Folkies are doing is making parlour arrangements of material which is better heard by the original singers, but being so beguiled, we're compelled to do so. Many lose sight of the Old Singers in this tertiary folk process. I keep ranting on about sourcing and listening and revering, but even the most seasoned folkie will look askance if told that his/her song has a better source than Steeleye Span. Tread carefully there, bonny lad, (though I might add that I seldom go on like this in the real world unless faced by a very particular fundamentalism (the dreaded Purist) but they, thankfully, are few & far between these days).

If some gifted young kid got up in a Folk Club and sang the whole of The Revealing Science of God accompanying him/herself on a mandolin (or better still if Jim Eldon did it on his fiddle, we can but dream) then I'd argue that in that manifestation it was, by dint of context alone, a folk song. The original, of course, is not a folk song - the original is merely part of the unbroken 50,000 year Tradition of Popular Music-making.