I have a hard time trying to decide in some case whether or not I want to call it folk (better - traditional. Folk has now gotten to be practically meaningless). I'd like to say that if no traditional singer sang all the verses verses of some version to that tune, then it isn't folk, but that doesn't always work. Ewan MacColl got some verses of "Eppie Morrie" and the tune from his father, but had to fill out the song from printed sources in order to have a coherent text. I can't say it's not traditional, but it's not pure traditional.

My stringent definitions drops out a lot of conflated texts of songs like 'The Seeds of Love/ Sprig of Thyme' and other such lyrics, because no one traditional singer is known to have sung the song that way. Where do we draw a line, or can we?

Even in the English Folk Song and Dance Society's early journals, traditional tunes were often given with verses partially or almost completely drawn from a chapbook or broadside text, so we have a lot of traditional tunes, but a lost less really traditional songs there.

I was initially appalled at some of the songs in Alfred Williams 'Folk Songs of the Upper Thames'. There were a lot that at that time I didn't consider to be folk songs at all. Now I think Williams probably has a good sampling of what traditional singers really sang, and he didn't listen for only the type of songs that other collectors were trying to get that fit those collectors notion of what was a folksong.