Now I imagine that GUEST 05 Jan 04 - 03:44 PM with "A ballad tells a story" is probably not the same person as GUEST 05 Jan 04 - 06:54 PM who evidently doesn't think much of that as a definition. Or of course it could be the same person doing a u-turn.
......

Of course the word ballad has acquired various meanings over tiem; that is what words often do. However it seems to me that, in a discussion about folk music the one about being "a song telling a story" is the most significant one.

An analogy: in a discussion about Russian Art, icon has a rather different meaning from the same word in a discussion about computers. The fact that the computer sense of the word may well be more often used these days in society as a whole does not alter that.