Pearls are created because there is some irritating little bit of something that can't get assimilated that provokes the oyster into starting to make a pearl.

That's more or less how iot works with folk music too. There's some individual, or set of individuals who are just obessed enough and ornary enough to get something going, and then it just grows from there, if things go right.

There have to be a few people around who are available to be drawn into it, play the music, gom tomthe convcerts or dances or whatever, and there are probably palces and time where this just isn't the case. But most of the time I suspect that they are there, but what is missing is the precipitating folk agitators.

And so far as I'm concerned, it's never a question of "what is folk", and if it's not "folk" it doesn't belong. The crucial thing is that it should be live music made by real people, without those present having hang-ups about when they were born, and without any kind of exclusion of songs just because of the date people started singing them.

What matters is, do the songs speak to the people listening? Are the singers singing them for any other reason than just to make a noise and to get people looking at them. And if it's tunes, could you dance to them if you wanted to?