I am not a musical scholar. I just play stuff.

Me too, just as a Horse Definitioner I carry in my heart the ideal that all music at least can be folk when it occurs in an essentially amateur / recreational / designated folk context. What the horse definition does is to put individual human beings back into the equation, whereas The 1954 Definition & the Folk Process remove them altogether, dealing instead with the collective mass. Never felt part of the collective mass myself - who does?

When I said the Folk Process was dead back there, I was, of course, being ironic, though from Jim Carroll's point of view it's as dead as a proverbial door nail simply because it no longer applies to the strictures of those sorts of songs in their pure Traditional context which no longer exists anyway. They have been removed from their natural habitat; a natural habitat which is no more; they are now the reserve of taxonomists and taxidermists - I avoid their threads because they smell of formaldehyde.

Traditional Musical Process is part and parcel of all music however; it is the creative urge by which musicians can formulate their essentially cultural craft and put it to whatever use they see fit. It as never been more alive than it is today. As Ian Curtis once sang: the past is now part of my future; the present is well out of hand. Exciting times indeed!