"saying the whole entertainment industry definitions are wrong because historical narrow definitions"
You seem to have hit the nail right on the head here Muskie - as far as I am concerned anyway.
The sole purpose of the music industry is to produce, package and market a music in order to sell it - no need to understand it or even like it as long as they can hang a price tag on it, pure and simple.
Folk song, on the other hand, is the product of ordinary people, made and remade by generations of land labourers, weavers, miners, seamen, soldiers from the ranks, below-decks sailors......, it reflected their lives, experiences and aspirations down the centuries.
The themes were universal enough to be taken up and passed on from generation to generation, crossing from trade to trade and community to community, spreading across counties, countries and even continents, so that a song created in, say a fairmtoon in Aberdeenshire, could turn up a century later in the mouth of a miner in Kentucky, or a Traveller in Roscommon.
I spent my life as a manual tradesman; I was told on leaving school that people like me weren't destined to be artistically creative and that all I needed was to be able to tot up my wage slip at the end of the week, and that is how it had always been.
On discovering folk music I found that this was not the case; I found that my people before me, who were land labourers in rural Ireland who had been driven out by The Famine and forced it settle all over the world, America, Canada, and in the case of my immediate family, Britain, had been part of a people who recorded their experiences in many thousands of songs.
My father's family, his father and grandfather, were merchant seamen.... part of an industry rich in song creation.
My father fought in Spain and came back with a small handful of songs produced by the people who fought on the Republican side there - the first couple of songs I ever learned were in Spanish.
When he was forced out of work for being a "premature anti-fascist" he became a navvy, a trade which produced a small but fairly significant body of songs about life on the road and away from home.
His sister and her husband settled in Derry and were driven out by anti-Catholic rioters in the forties - all reflected in songs of the period.
That may be "narrow and historical" to you, it isn't for me.
For me, it's part of what we are and where we've been and it's why, every time this subject comes up, I will try to make a distinction between the songs that are churned out by the music industry for a profit and those that have been made by people of my background which are a part of my cultural and social history.
This isn't to dismiss commercially-made songs as unimportant, they aren't.
They provide a great deal of entertainment for many millions of people - including me, though moreso in the past, than nowadays,
but they are a different beast altogether.
That may not be your bag - if not, sorry 'bout that, can't help you.
Jim Carroll