The glitch is the purist or sentimentalist argument, as wiser counsels than myself have pointed out, is that someone must have generated the song in the first place. I'm prepared to accept that there are archetypal cultural motifs - the simplest hummed lullabies, two chord worksongs (with the emphasis on the work, not the song), but as soon as verses enter the fray, an authorial hand can be recognised and it's no longer folk - a cultural observation has been made and artifice can be deduced, someone, somewhere done it.

It's hard not have sympathy with those who take a hard line on the first definition of folk and hope to trace a primitive and essential structure to music but once types of instruments are mentioned, song sheets and the rest of the bourgeois, academic, new masquerading as old stuff all bets are off and folk is no different to any other acoustic form with similar preoccupations.

Personally I don't need anyone to tell me what 'folk is', which is a realistic response to a mediated definition that comes from outside community. The community have decided and that's folk enough for me.