More time now.
"because they can't bear the thoughts that they might have been wrong all this time,"
All sniping aside; the problem I have with all this is, despite numerous requests you have failed to tell us what your alternative definition is based on. I still have no idea what you mean by 'designated folk context' so I can only assume that you would put the responsibilty for defining our music into the hands of a group of self-appointed individuals who are not even in the position of reaching some sort of a concensus among themselves. So their/your definition of 'folk' is purely an individual one.
You won't address the contradictions that this raises (string quartette, Dog And Duck vs Pindar of Wakefield, etc) so I can only assume that there are no solutions to them.
I may be a romantic, but I have done the groundwork - have you?
When we started collecting we had an extremely vague idea of what we were getting into. From the word 'go' we made a point of interviewing the people we were recording to attempt to find out how the tradition worked (or had once worked). With the Travellers we were extremely lucky. They still had a living tradition, songs were still being taken in by the community, adapted, remade, and passed on, and most importantly, new songs were still being made and absorbed. All this within a non-literate community.
The point is the 54 definition worked; it needed some tweaking, but it was a valid description of what happened within a given community.
All the work we did is freely accessible to be verified at The British Library or in Merrion Square.
If you can provide any information to show where we went wrong and why our work was "a gross falsification of the evidence by those whose main cause was to prove a theoretical agenda which had little or no basis in reality", I really would be interested to hear it.
Yours in anticipation
Jim Carroll