Here in the U.S. in the 1950's lots of people sang together, and the songs that were shared were called folk songs. When my family went camping in state parks, someone would build a camp fire and there were songs everyone knew like "Careless Love," "Down in the Valley," "Sweet Betsy from Pike," etc. Folk songs were sung by church groups, community groups, labor groups, and "lefties." Your accounts above of how folk music became commercialized and how some people sought the older forms rather than the commercial forms sound like an accurate description. The Weavers sounded to me like an extension of the music I was singing with other people. Peter Paul and Mary did not. By the 1980's I found that Pete Seeger's singing had moved too far from "traditonal folk music." Or maybe I had moved to far towards older forms????
Is it phony for city people to sing songs about rural traditions or white collar workers sing songs about manual labor? They are the songs that this city girl grew up singing, and that is what my daughter heard as a child too.
I once asked Jack Langstaff about wealthy people singing songs from poor rural areas. He said something to the effect that the songs were beautiful
I guess I drifted a bit from what some of you are talking about, but through the differences from period to period and sensibility to sensibility, music touches something in us. Problems arise when we try to claim that what we like is better than what others like (whoever "we" are.)