> And your consensually agreed alternative definition is......?

That's the point: though most (though obviously not all)stress oral tradition and variation, there is none.

What I posted are just two *very* inconsistent definitions from expert sources - professional folklorists and/or musicologists/ anthropologists in each case. If the 1954 def. is still somehow "better" (and why would it be?), it isn't because the definers were any more accomplished - so far as I can tell.

Folk clubs are a special case. They've developed historically in a way that leads older people like Jim to reasonably expect a certain kind of song. Others simply don't care about the exceptions. I agree that a "folk club" should concentrate on "folk music," but if some day most of the people involved come to think of rock and rap as "folk music," and that's how their tastes run, you get a new kind of club and need a broader - or, much better, an additional - definition of "folksong." Demanding that they listen to reason won't bring back the past, especially if they won't understand the reasons.

People don't want theory: they want music.

"Folksong" is not a clearly applied, indispensible scientific term like "proton." Our understanding of protons may constantly be improving, but physicists agree on the basic meaning of "proton." All else is details.

There's a big difference here. No professional insists that electrons are really protons, or that some protons aren't protons at all. Reality *forces* a consensus, because without it, experiments and textbooks would become meaningless and discussions dissolve in chaos. That could spell disaster.

But when discussions about a largely subjective label like "folksong" become meaningless and dissolve in chaos, as they tend to, the sole real-world consequences are eye-rolling and a spike in blood pressure.

If it's songs we're interested in, not lists, we'll focus on the songs and not how and why someone else wants to label them.

Meanwhile, nobody seems ready to prescribe once and for all why any of the songs I listed (and there are so many, many more in line) are or are not folksongs, just according to definitions already on this thread. To do so might inadvertently give us some new insights into the songs, but we'd be no closer to agreement on what "makes" a folksong.

A single rigorous, imposed definition of a hazy and disputed concept is neither necessary nor possible. In other words, not worth doing.

Except for people who get a kick out of it, people even more pedantic than I am.