'Folk' has an established, widely accepted definition used globally by those working in the field ' (researchers, collctors, educationalists eg. - those who record, document, write up and teach - those who make permanent).

That is it is an academic definition. I do not mean that in the pejorative sense that the term "academic" is often used, but that it is a definition by and for academics - those engaged in scholarly work - in this case, in the field of folk music and folklore.

As a retired academic (in engineering rather than folklore) I would caution care in using academic definitions outside the context for which they were developed because all sorts of misunderstandings start to creep in as a result of the "adopters" not being fully aware of the original context. The result being the the outside world's meaning of the term becomes different from that of those who originally defined the term.

Much of what Tom Bliss wrote earlier makes perfect sense to me and I can see where he is coming from. As I understand it, he is describing what happens to a term when it becomes adopted outside of its original context - in this case the world of the folk music collector. An example of what I described above.

For the, admittedly limited, time I have been involved again with folk music more recently, it has become clear to me that the term "folk" generally encompasses more than the 1954 definition and that it does not seem to have a precise definition. This is largely because working musicians and folk music audiences one way and another do not have the same need for a precise definition of the term "folk" that academics do.

For the most part the term folk seems to be used in the big wide world to refer to both traditional music and to more recently composed music in the folk idiom. The term does not have precise boundaries and some would take it wider and others narrower.

One of the problems with most of these discussions is that there is a variety of sets of assumptions being made which are not made explicit. As a result misunderstandings occur because the various parties to the discussion are not always really discussing the same thing and because they take their underlying assumptions for granted and assume that others share the same set of assumptions which is not necessarily true. This ultimately leads to the kind of bickering which so irritates many people - myself included.