"To be fair, you have to scroll through the myriad posts of Jim and his mates to see why I said what I did."
Before you start apportioning blame, I would point out that my main bone of contention has been the dismissive, insulting and in some cases, extremely personal way this argument has been conducted - particularly towards people who have no part in it and are not part of our folkie world - source singers and Travellers have been subject to somewhat dismissive and occasionally, deeply insulting racist and ageist attacks as thieves and geriatric no-marks    - not on in a discussion on folk song, as far as I'm concerned.
If your problem is my disagreeing with what you have to say it is just that - your problem.
Whether you actually believe what you wrote, or wrote it to wind me up doesn't matter particularly - "that's what you wrote" as the song says - you succeeded in winding me up.
It would be disingenuous of me to point the finger - any fault here lies equally with both of us - you for behaving the way you have, me for rising to the bait - my unreserved apologies to all for the latter.
Richard is, of course right - songs by known authors can and have become folk songs - I have not suggested that they can't,
One of my first statements was that Travellers were making songs right up tp the nineteen nineties and probably still are.
I have argued that modern pop songs cannot become 'folk songs' because they belong to someone else other than the folk and will remain so until we have the mechanism back to make them our own.
You want to argue that we are all 'the folk' - up to you, were back to the talking horse - which gets us back to where we all came in over a century ago.
The fact remains that an identifiable body of songs exists which have undergone a particular process which led them to be called 'folk' - not my doing - long before I was ever a twinkle.....
It is diversive to talk about "rule books" or "libraries" or "copyright".... it is the process and the people involved which makes a song folk - everything else if incidental.
Personally - I don't need '54 or any definition to recognise a folk songs - I have spoken to enough field singers to have learned that they regard a particular body of songs as unique - whatever they choose to call them - we call them 'folk songs' - I go along with that.
It is insulting to nobody to state that fact - I can't for the life of me see why Muskie and Al, both who have written them off a irrelevant and "part of the dim and distant past" and "far less popular than Elvis, et al, should get their knickers in a twist about a genre of songs they have made clear they don't particularly like (whatever lip-service they choose to offer)
My concern is the damage that has been done by the forcing out of traditional songs by material that belongs elsewhere - acculturation is the technical term for what has happened.
Songs by The Boomtown Rats, or Lady Gaga, or Elvis..... will never become folk songs until we all get our mojo back and become participants in our culture rather than recipients of it - it really is as simple as that.
Back to page one again - you don't set out to write a folk song any more than you write a hit song - they become what they become via specific processes.
That is an assessment based on over a century's worth of well-documented and argued research
If you want to change that definition, produce an alternative other than the Humpty Dumpty one - "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
Jim Carroll