If the folk who created and perpetuated folk music are believed to have died out the same cannot be said of folklore, whatever definition of it one uses. This begs the question, has folk music died as a living entity? And if it has, is the problem one of definition?

Example - my mother believed shiny objects like cutlery and by extension mirrors, attracted lightning. She believed it because her mother believed it as did her mother. She also thought a window and a door, or two doors should be left open 'to let the lightning out'. My sister and my uncles children believe the same in a debased and occluded form, recognised within the family, not spoken of outside. However the 'Enlightenment' had been running for two centuries when my mother was born (and for about three hundred years now) without any noticable effect on her belief in Lore. Neither was physics a stranger to their manually skilled community. One can only conclude that they simultaneously held two systems of belief without seeing them as vying, in much the same way as a highly skilled medic could be a consultant and, say, a practicing muslim.

It would be interesting to ponder whether those who still practiced folk music as an on-going tradition felt in competition with either chamber music or the music hall, or whether it existed in an entirely different part of their musical universe, one which they could turn on and off at will?
If that is the case is the notion of direct and unproblematic hypodermically received folk itself a myth.