There's a difference in kind between the kid bashing out the chords to 'Wonderwall' on a cheap guitar, and the parent singing to their child a song that they learned by osmosis from their own parent or grandparent (not something that happens too much these days, I would guess).

I honestly don't think there is; it's traditional process, albeit compounded by other factors, but in essence it's exactly the same thing, no matter how cheap the guitar. You can imagine how things would turn out as the kid got better at it and used the lesson of Wonderwall as a basis for their own understanding of what is essentially a creative idiom, which is probably how Wonderwall came about in the first place as one out other of the Gallagher brothers put their Rutles / Beatles chops to work for them as songmakers, just as Lennon did before them on his own cheap guitar. These things still happen; they're intregral to the way music works as a process, just these days if we want music, we don't necessarily have to do it ourselves. Maybe that's the key here? But even in that context many would deny that much pre-tecnological domestic music making consisted of anything which we might call idiomatic Folk.

I've got the horse before the cart; even those who celebrated it as Working Class culture did it from on high and romanticised a very selective view of that culture in which Idiomatic Folk was the exception rather than the rule even to the point of falsifying the evidence (Blackleg Miner). Other music was very much in evidence, and still is, alive and well from brass bands to rock bands to hip hop crews and fluffy morris dancers. In context, and by definition of the 1954 Definition, Folk Music (and Folklore, Folkdance and Folktale) are all thriving concerns of Popular Culture, just none of it would be of any interest to Folkies, who would regard it as debased, factory manufactured and otherwise unworthy of romanticisation or Steamfolk reinvention, just as romanticised Steamfolk isn't generally associated with, or consumed by, the working classes.

Then we have Tommy Armstrong; a song writer of Folk Song and Ballad in the Traditional Idiom and revered by his community for his mastery of his craft.

Forgive my rambling; am presently very anxious about impending appointment at the dentists having lost one of my front teeth the other week....

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Back on Thread. Has any of the various Robin Hood Ballads known from Child etc. ever been sound-recorded from a living traditional singer? And what of their melodies & sources thereof?