I know some of the other "seasoned citizens" on this thread can relate to the following.

In the late 1950's, when I really began to be heavily involved in my local coffee house circuit, the argument was usually between the "ethnic" or "traditional" wing and the more progressive one, for which musicianship, stage presence and good arrangements were of great importance as well as the source music.

Some of the traditionalists (most of them from comfortable middle-class families) wore eastern european garb, affecting the neo-Bolshevik look, or dressed like seedy "street folk" or just sat in the corner, tuning their homemade dulcimers or playing chess and smoking gnarled briar pipes, affecting a sort of esoteric superiority. Sometimes, they would deign to teach us a song or two, which we joyfully accepted and often adapted to our own style.

Most of the rest of us, young and often apolitical, just wanted to play music and have our shot at performing on stage. What the hell, there were pretty girls there, and we were full of what ardent young folk are full of. We shared songs from The Weavers, Burl Ives, Bud and Travis and Bob Gibson or Terry Gilkyson to The Kingston Trio. We wanted to "sound good." If a traditional song worked for us, we used it. Many of the songs we favored were composed in the 20th century, not in the middle ages.

Of course, boundaries were crossed. The purists taught us some reverence for the origins of songs and the countries and traditions from which they came, though they were sometimes heavy-handed about it. Both camps got into the endless discussions about finding and tinkering with guitars and banjos, chords, strums and finger picking, etc.

In the end, I don't know that there was any resolution. Folk song is what any of us perceives it to be. There is no "snapshot in time" which forms boundaries for what constitutes folk music. I believe it is endlessly being created, composed and performed to this day, whether by trained musicians or creative amateurs speaking to their life experience through music.

Lou Gottlieb, of The Limeliters, was a musicologist with a PhD. He obviously had a reverence for the academic side, but it did not keep him from realizing that, if you want wider acceptance, it doesn't hurt to be well-rehearsed and to use good musicianship and stage presence. I wish he were still around. I would like to pose the question, "What is folk music?" to him.