I like The Imagined Village too. It accounts for the condition of the revival as a bourgeois construct, which is exactly what it is: a highly selective paternalistic imperialist fantasy of working-class cultural 'traditions' meticulously pieced together from the shards and fragments of particular idioms of popular song, dance and custom which the working class themselves had largely given up on in the light of new developments (dare I say improvements?) in technology and lifestyle giving rise to the reactionary mawkishness that has typified folk since Cecil Sharp's Epiphany of August 22nd 1903.   

That's what folk is - it is born and perpetuated by cultural & class dichotomy. What The Imagined Village and Fakesong do is attempt to account for that with a twist of cultural criticism to contextualise the thing with moderate affection. All very straightforward one might have thought, and though by no means perfect I suspect the inherent fundamentalism of The Revival informs a lot of the opposition here - the belief that Folk is anything else other than a specialist idiom of popular music, or that the 1954 Definition tells us anything that isn't true of ALL music, whatever the genre.