Banjiman;,
Come to some of the festivals and singing week-ends here in Ireland.
The standard of singing can range from good to superb (in English and Irish) and (believe it or not) people actually enjoy the (old and new) songs, !!!!
Relevance; I was brought up with the idea that good culture (song, music, literature, theatre, art) was timeless, otherwise the current generation would ritually burn everything 'old' (as you appear to be proposing with folk song).
Now where did I put my Shakespeare - there's a bit of a nip in the air this morning!
Kent
"by the 1954 definition.etc..etc there were none written"
Not strictly true; Travellers were still making songs up to the mid seventies, until portable television came along and stopped the open-air singing sessions.
Children continued to make songs for the playground - don't know if they still do, or if this has been replaced by text messages and interactive software games.
In the first half of the 20th century there was still a fairly strong songmaking tradition in rural Ireland, mainly about the major issue here - emigration.
One of the peculiarities of the ones we recorded was that even though they must have been written well within the lifetimes of the singers, we hardly ever managed to find out who had written them.
The death-knell of the tradition came when we became passive recipients of, rather than participants in our culture.
Jim Carroll