I aways know you're bullshitting when you call me 'old man'

Jim - I only call you Old Man as a mark of respect. Seriously. It comes from the film 'For a Few Dollars More' - it's what Clint Eastwood's Monco calls Lee Van Cleef's Col. Mortimer. It acknowledges the simple fact that we both are, each of us in our own very different ways, Bounty Hunters in the wilds of Folk Song. It also acknowledges that I defer entirely to both your seniority and your contribution to a greater work before which I stand in awe. I'm not bullshitting here - I'm just an average Folkie with a proclivity for mouthing off in the face of entrenched religiosity & fundamentalism which (I feel) ill befits the glory of the subject. Personally, I count in an honour that you bother discussing these things with me at all. It always passes a cheery hour....

So...

Your argument was "Pop music is Traditional Music" - look IFMC said so, so it must be true.

Would the IFMC said such a thing? The ICTM certainly did - and not without good reason. It is my contention that the Pop music of today is part of an unbroken continuous tradition of Vernacular Music Making stretching back 50,000 years at least. Each idiomatic genre of Pop Music derives from that which proceeded it - nothing came out of nowhere. This to me is what Traditional means. It's acknowleding the glorious Rootedness of all human music making and respecting it accordingly. Pop, Folk, & Classical musics are all born of Traditions and Processes and are thus evolving as a consequence. For sure, you can go back and isolate a particular idiom (as Prof Child did with his Popular Ballads) but that filters out so much else and creates the false picture upon which the Folk Song Revival is predicated. It's a nice picture though - as nice as those on the Axon Broadsides certainly, but just part of something that always a good deal broader.