I agree with the earlier post about "folk" being a process.

I imagine many of the tunes we now refer to as "folk" would not be classed so at the time, even if the term had existed.

If "folk" is supposed to be anon then we might ask whether Burns was writing in "folk-style" or was he simply doing what others had done for years before, putting his own words to old tunes?

Just because we know he wrote these versions, does it make it less "folk"? Indeed, my copies of several Scottish songbooks list a number of songs as "trad", when they are noted Burns songs.

Elias Lonnrot, the writer of the Kalevala, was criticised for changing his collected material (although he was open about what he had changed and what the original text was). However, as he had travelled and collected the songs from rune-singers, and he had learned many of them himself, he considered himself a singer in the same tradition and vein as those he collected from, indeed as good as some of them. His changes were simply those of a rune-singer making the material his own.