Haven't got time to get to involved in this - am in the middle of our traditional music summer school - briefly.
"Second, I am tempted to write a definitive book of rules and state that this is folk and nothing else is"
It's facile and unpleasent comments like this that send threads like this crashing in flames make it impossible to discuss our different approaches to our music(s) - a form of cyber-bullying.
There are no "rules" as to how folk music "should" be performed (other than those invented by people who neither understand nor particularly like traditional music"). There certainly has been no evidence of their existance other than 'urban-legend-type' references to "purists".
There certainly are personal tastes, but these get bulldozed into the ground by stupid and nasty phrases like "purist", "finger-in-ear" and "folk police (or even fascist)".
The folk scene has built an impregnable wall around itself, leaving us with a sickly anodyne critical mechanism by which we can judge how well or badly we are doing and what impact our music is having outside our 'folk-greenhouses'.
Music calls
Jim Carroll