I write songs and the few that bring the bacon home are marketed as folk.

If they were marketed otherwise, the champagne might not be quite so good a vintage... (Perspective. I couldn't live on what I get. Overgrown hobby and good luck if truth be known.) That said, I'm not a professional performer and tend to write for others. (My own act, just me and guitar, I slip in a lot of takes on traditional songs, or folk songs as Jim would call them.)

One excellent example of the living folk tradition is how it has evolved to encompass style and performance since 1954 or whenever. Music is an abstraction. That it can be a carrier for portraying historical or human accounts is wonderful, but many traditional songs are as much about sex as any rock n roll song and many contemporary songs fit the bill "songs of the people."

Just look at the list of Mudcat threads at any particular time. Lyrics req' or which song has a line in it about shaving a turkey etc. not a folk song amongst them if the irrelevance brigade have their way.

That's it folk!