it seems to me that some posters are confusing the issue by using the word indiscriminately, and sometimes simultaneously, in both/all of these senses at once.

As an ill-educated lower-caste oik content to ramble the hinterlands of Popular Music in general I have no problem whatsoever in Popular meaning the same in a Prof Child sense or a Tim Westwood sense or an Annie Nightingale sense. Pop is an umbrella heading for a myriad styles, idioms and genres that are born from the 50,000 year old tradition of Vernacular Music Making, and which continues with vigour to this day. Indeed, as long as there are Human Beings alive, there will be Vigorous Popular Music Making.

Folk, OTOH, is a prescriptively precious construct, hatched from on high, which seeks after an all too elusive purity, and when it finds it, it isolates it, refashions it into something it never was in its natural habit - be it Cecil Sharp making a parlour arrangement of The Seeds of Love, or Peter Bellamy singing Butter and Cheese and All. Both are equally contrived; both are an artitifice. Folk is a subject of fetishism for a crypto-religious elite that doesn't really connect with the 'real world'. This is, of course, an integral part of its appeal for the cranky, mad, eccentric, idiosyncratic, curmudeonly, misanthropic self-serving middle-class academic elite that typifies the Folk Scene even unto this day.

I say these things as a lover of Folk Music. But its worth remembering that whilst much Great Music is done by Folkies (I bet Cecil's arrangement of SOL was a cracker; just as Bellamy's various recorded renderings B&C&A are amongst my life's joys) there are no Proper Folk Songs ever sung in a Revival Context. The Proper Folk Songs are dead and gone with the Proper Folk Singers; and the Stone that Builders Rejected is the Cornerstone of all Future Vernacular Music Making on Planet Earth regardless of idiom.

Including Folk? Maybe...