I think there might be a back formation going on with the term "folk". One of the original interests in studying folk music was for the first-hand history and sociology they contained. The protest songs written in more modern times contain this same kind of history and have become recognized as folk songs.

Most of our music, be it classical or popular, derives from folk music of some kind. It almost seems like, when you produce a piece of music, you can decide yourself if it is folk or not.

If one wants to get technical, nothing Bob Dillan wrote, and little that Joan Biaz sang was music of th folk. Neither are most of the Leadbelly songs that have been remastered. They were all recorded and/or written by the artists to entertain an unknown mass market, consisting of people with nothing in common but the fact that the music apeals to them (and perhaps that they are willing to buy it). But if a folk station were to materialize that didn't play these things, boy would I complain!

By the way, I don't think many would consider Johnnie Ray songs to be "folk"; but a guy named Mickey Katz made Yiddish paradoxes of some of his songs in the '50s. I can't put my finger on it, but I somehow consider his stuff to be closer to folk music. Perhaps because it was done by a member of a subset of American culture to entertain other members of the subset. Like the blues sung by the blacks in the '20-30s, it was written to be appreciated by those who understood the argot and shared common experiences. It also made use of the musical styles of the subset (eg interspersed froelichs.)

Murray