Richard
I'll respond as well as I can to your points
"and in a wider sense by the man in the street."
The term is not used by "the man in the street" in any significant sense, certainly not enough to re-define it, as is being claimed here.
The term has been taken and applied to a different type - (or types) of music - there appears to be no consensus on what type of song I will hear if I turn up at a folk club today - so I no longer have the choice I once had, to select what I wish to listen to - I can think of no other performed art form where this is the case.
"Buffalo Bill" never claimed to be a buffalo - he would heve been banged up and put in a padded jacket if he had, so would Elephant Bill, or Crocodile Joe or Eddie the Eagle, or a Man Called Horse..... a nickname is not a definition of anything.
"What about rare ballads"
Rare ballads are rare because at the time that we found them, few people were singing them.
The two you mentioned have survived for centuries in the mouths and memories of innumerable singers up to the point where they had all but disappeared - that's what gave them their claim to being folk songs - they were the property of the folk and were almost certainly made within the old folk communities.
The rarity of certain centuries old ballads and songs can be put down the fact that there was no significant interest in folk song prior to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the singing traditions were very much on the wane.
Non literate Irish travellers were the sources of a singficant number of rare ballads, The Maid and the Palmer' being one of the most spectacular examples, indicating that they were firmly established in the oral folk tradition.
"Consider all the ballads about kings, lords and ladies, those about sibling murders "
Not sure of your point here, but all these motifs are a firm part of the oral folk tradition, particularly in tales, and the situations they occur in within the ballads can largely be dealt with in everyday human terms - it wasn't all that long ago that people were announcing the death of a family member by 'telling the bees'.
Our traditional songs work on several levels - they work a stories to entertain and also as expressions of our own outlook on life - a good singer can do both, the older generation appeared to do both with ease - I could't count the number of times that a singer has told us "That's a true song", not particularly because they thought it had happened, but simply because it created a situation they could relate to.
"But you need only attend a particular club once to find out, "
In which case, contact with folk songs become an accident which only can occur chooses to present folk songs - no longer the case in many.
The folk club scene came about because people discovered a specific kind of music and and decided it was entertaining enough to follow up
One of the main ways of doing this was to set up venues where you could go to listen and perform them - in Britain,they were largely based on the songs that were collected by the BBC teams between 1950 and 55 - pretty well definable as folk songs.
When the type of songs became undefinable, the basis for the club scene was destroyed - they became 'music' clubs - nothing to do with folk creation or ownership.
"with some changes from the original words"
Change is not a defining feature of what makes folk song, though it can be part of the process.
MacColl's Freeborn Man may well have become a folk song because Travellers took it up as their own; unfortunately the process of passing on the song to make it part of the Traveller culture may well have disappeared due to changes in the community
That is very much the case within the settled communities, where we have become passive recipients of our culture - we take what we are given, but they are not ours and never will be - any use we make of it has to be with the permission of the creators.
"And what about Dylan's making new songs out of existing ones"
Fine - that's what I have been advocating should happen for most of the time I have been involved (Dylan wrote his folk-based songs half a century ago - he announced he was moving on and did) - they'll never become folk songs because he made sure they wouldn't, but beside the point
MacColl said about forty years ago that the folk scene would die if it ever fell into the hands of the music industry and if it was ever taken over by people who didn't like folk songs.
Much of what is being performed at clubs, according to contributors to this argument, is the property of the Music Industry already and the fact that it is in the hands of people who don't like folk song has been confirmed by some of those taking part - I particularly liked the idea of buying Fred Jordan a pint and sitting him down to listen to Fairport - that'll do nicely.
Plenty more to respond to - will do so when I can, breakfast calls.
Jim Carroll