If the good Captain Birdseye choose to serenade his goat with Dylan songs, that is his choice. If he does so, each time he milks that little darlin', he will have created his own tradition, marrying the melody to the motion. (Folksongs tend to be functional or "working" songs). The same holds true for Ron, timing his pressing duties to the strains of "Abraham, Martin and John". You have to do something more than once for it to become a tradition.
I believe that the bone of contention is not in the defining of trad or folk but, rather, in the method of defining them. I contend that folk and trad are not defined by style or age but by function. I think that there are several catagories of folk.
There is functional folk, those songs that are or were used by a community in a repeated ritual (Hymns, camp songs, lullabyes, national anthems, jumprope songs, nursery rhymes, wedding marches, Auld Lang Syne, Happy Birthday, Take Me Out To The Ballgame, The Worms Crawl In, Taps). They allow those of us, who have never been Down Under, to bond with the shearers by singing "Click Go the Shears" or be cowboys or seamen 'board a whaler. They are of great value and should be honored and promoted by folksong societies.
There are, what I call, folk relics, songs of another time, not maintained by ritual function but as cultural oral history. They are honored just because they are so old that their time of popularity is forgotten and they exist as something like family heirlooms (Greensleeves, all the Child ballads, La Paloma, Cietito Linda, many of Steven T. Foster's songs, those Gay Nineties classics like Daisy, Daisy)
There are many talented writers who have written with the various traditions of these two types. While their songs do not fit into either catagory, a critic would have to be suffering from terminal pedantry to fail to appreciate such dedicated lovers of trad as Jimmy Driftwood, Cyril Tawney, Ewen MacColl who wrote with respect and reverence for the traditions they chose to join. So, if Bruce Phillips wants to call his songs "folk" (which he does not), I wouldn't fight with him more than usual.

                         Mike