Folk Snobbery

When I was in high school there was folk program on a Philadelphia station on Sunday nights. A friend used to record the programs for me and one day we were listening to one of those recordings when she said, “Listen to this one. It's some guy named Bob Die-lan. He thinks he's Woodie Guthrie!” We both snickered. He was obviously not authentic; an upstart.
There were lots of groups I turned up my nose at over the years: Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Kingston Trio (even though I loved their music earlier), The Chad Mitchell Trio. They were all “too commercial” , too polished, not “ethnic” enough.
We even sang a parody of Dylan's “Hard Rain”: And it's a hard/And it's a hard/And it's a hard/And it's a hard/And it's so haaaaard to be ethnic.” Ethnic was a big word back then.
I remember how he was booed at the Newport Folk Festival in '66 for using an electric guitar. Who now could say Bob Dylan didn't profoundly affect the music of the second half of the Twentieth century, both “folk” and “pop”.
Is the difference between them one of altruism and “folk process” vs. commerce? Much of what we call folk music today was the pop music of the past. Broadside ballads that were once flogged in the marketplace to make a penny for the song-writer are now accepted as traditional. Their purpose may have been to inform or even inflame, but I'll bet it that frequently it was also to support the song-writer. That's commercial, yes? Pop, even?
I was at a pub in Vancouver, BC, back in the '70s, with a mostly Brit group of singers. We went round the table each singing in turn. There were some damned good singers there; the best the BC folk scene had to offer. When it came my turn I sang “When Jones's Ale Was New”. I sang it a bit differently than was known to that group. This led to indulgent (and patronizing) chuckles and glances exchanged between the Brits. I was embarrassed but continued. I've never forgotten that.
The version I sang was just as “authentic” as the version they knew. I'd learned it from a Library of Congress field recording of an old American Cape Horner.
Every singer of a traditional song learned that song from someone else or from some written source or recording. The old traditional singers, most of them probably, learned them from someone else. And every one of them changed the song in some way; a word change, changing a place-name, a dropped or changed word, altering the tune, repeating part of the text as a chorus, perhaps even just emphasizing a different phrase. That's the folk process.
I won't go as far as Big Bill Broonzy's definition of “If folks sing it it's a folk song”, but I'm sure as hell a lot more tolerant nowadays than I was back in high school!