Any explanation of "folk" that does not distinguish it from art or composed music is absurd, for then the boundary is merely a matter of taste

Getting back to the nature of the thread, all aspects of human culture share a common root from which they've evolved into a multiplicity of idioms. We might say language is different to music, although many notable scholars & linguists will point out the similarities not just the connections between one language and other, but between language on the whole and music on the whole, the structures of which - from basic syntax to sonata form to the morphology of the Indo-European folktale - are, somehow, biologically determined by the brain that made them.

Morphologically there's a lot of similarities between humans and other mammals - be they giraffes or bats - that are well known and demonstrable and are part / parcel of our understanding of evolutionary process. We learn in school that we have the same number of neck bones as a giraffe and that a bat's wing is essentially the same as our hand because we share a common evolutionary ancestor.

Music arises at some point 50,000 years ago. As with language and other cultural attributes it evolves - it accumulates and diversifies into a multiplicity of different possibilities, but, as with life, always with more similarities than differences. The idioms we think of as Folk Music - and it is idiomatic, nothing to do with the truly absurdist and patronising precepts of the 1954 Definition - are no different to any other music - Popular, Art, or whatever. Human beings create idiomatic music within idiomatic idioms driven by cultural commonality and the needs of the individual who is always part of a community. It is that which defines all human culture, and all music, bar none, be it Border Balladry, Hip Hop, Baroque concertos or the furthest reaches of experimentalism - all is changing, evolving and born from what went before it. All is fluid, flux and ever changing tradition because that is the law of the cosmos. Amen to that!

*

and if she did, how would she pronounce it?

Sib You Yarf! of course. That final B is silent...

*

I do hope all this horse play doesn't result in deletions; the worst ire I ever invoked from Pope Joe was when, back in November 2009. I defended MtheGM's right to call me a cunt. I wasn't excommunicated as such but I received a PM to tell me how much I disgusted him.