To be fair, chaps, the 1954 Definition tells us a lot, but only about the Folk Mindset that made it up in the first place, and those who adhere to it today. It is a very bourgeois misunderstanding of a working class art form on a quite monumental scale really, one that has, in effect, claimed the music by isolating entirely from the natural habitat of its causal cultural context and then subjected it to the further indignities of a cultural revival... Meanwhile, the actual tradition of Popular Music Making that gave the Old Folk Songs birth in the first place (and would have given them dignified death & burial were it not for romantically inclined antiquarians & latter day ressurectionists intent of breathing new life into them) has carried on quite happily and continues to do so today, albeit in ways which are of little interest to Folkies of either stripe - who are either too bigoted, culturally autistic, or (let's face it) just too damn old for anything but the comforts of nostalgia. I include myself in this latter category BTW; since turning 50 last year I find myself increasingly ill at ease in the modern world, thus do gaze into old woodcuts & the broadsides they illustrate through rose coloured cataracts. The other day in an antique shop I actually bought an old Gypsy-made clothes peg (as fine a piece of treen as you'll ever see; true - er - folk art) to use as a mute on my fiddle...   

As an Antiquarian (by default & passion) the past fascinates me, and I'm easily seduced by The Archaeology, however so mislabelled and misprepresented - as is the case with so-called folklore as a whole - but that doesn't take away the joy of the thing, much less the joy of museums. One would hope (for example) whilst Richard and I might en joy debating the finer points of theory on Mudcat, should we actually meet face to face we'd be too busy singing to put anybody down - which is the important thing here, and why that earlier Holy Ghostly sigh of Pope Joe is the most disagreeable thing (so far) on this entire thread, though Tootler's twittish tweet runs it a close second.