Fascinating stuff, but I doubt very much Sloop John B was sung as a Trad Folk Song on the occasion I refer to, rather as a slice of a wider Cultural Ambience which is common to us all which might, from time to time, include the odd actual Folk Song (such as Child Ballad #1) but includes a lot of other stuff to. It could just as well have been Yellow Submarine* for I, or indeed anyone else, cared at the time: as far as we concened we weren't singing anything so rarefied as a Trad Folk Song but a common or garden Pop Song which to the majority of people (myself included) of course it is. It only becomes a Trad Folk Song if subjected to the sort of sourcing and scrutiny we see here, otherwise it lives & breathes as something else entirely.

* Mike France of Spitting on a Roast once told me how his daughter collected a fragmentary Folk Processed Yellow Submarine from the singing of other children in the playground when she first went to school, entirely obvious of its actual source. Now that fits the 1954 Definition like a glove:

...it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community.

The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, for it is the re-fashioning and re-creation of the music by the community that gives it its folk character.

By the same token of course, our version of Sloop John B was a folk song, but not for the reasons given by Don et al, rather because we took what was, in essence, a Pop Song and gave it shed loads of Folk Character in our spontanbeous re-fashioning & re-creation of it!