Gene, I don't think from your last comments that you've looked deeply into the tradition. There are many folk songs with neither a "strong melody" nor "intelligent lyrics."

Work songs are a good example; the point there is rhythm, not melody, and the words can be literally whatever the singer thinks of at the time:

It's 'round Cape Horn we all must go
Go down, you blood red roses, Go down.
'Round Cape Horn in the frost and snow.
Go down, you blood red roses, Go down.

cho: Oh, you pinks and posies,
Go down, you blood red roses, Go down.

Or, say, American banjo songs. The melody tends to be almost non-existent, and the words just silly stuff like:

Yonder comes Sal with a snicker and a grin, groundhog.
Yonder comes Sal with a snicker and a grin, groundhog.
Yonder comes Sal with a snicker and a grin,
Groundhog grease around her chin, groundhog.


There are also plenty of traditional ballads that I think many of us would find pretty inane. The truth is not that they wouldn't have survived in tradition; they did. They did not, however, survive in the revival, because they're not to modern folk-revivalists' taste.

(Folk revivalists are a generally image-conscious bunch in their way, and especially concerned that their music and lyrics be intelligent. The people who sang these songs a hundred years ago had other criteria.)

Then there are the songs that are melodically so hard to sing, you have to be bloody good to make a go of it. Not, in other words, readily hum-able. "The Streams of Lovely Nancy," for example. That song also has some lines so obscure, no-one knows what they mean. It survived, I believe, because it was beautiful, not because it was readily hum-able or lyrically intelligent.

The real problem for your "definition," though, it that the two main criteria are really just value judgments. What you find "strong" and "intelligent" will be very different from anyone else. I know this might not seem important to you, but what is the point of even having a category of "folk music" if it's just, as Shimrod and others have said, "what I like and approve of?"

If you want to define music that way, just call it "stuff Gene thinks is strong and intelligent." We won't necessarily disagree with you on the individual songs, it's just that many of us think that pop and classical and jazz can be lyrically intelligent and melodically strong, without requiring that it therefore also be "folk music."