> folk, however you care to define it will die,

Well, with the passage of time (a long time, one hopes) all but one or two of the songs we're arguing about will have been utterly forgotten except by a few antiquarians who will categorize them any way they want. (Perhaps merely as "old songs.")

Otherwise, if a definition becomes thoroughly outmoded and falls into disuse, all that really "dies" is the categorization. The songs outlive it - if people want them to.

To be perfectly serious, cultural style is certainly a factor in the sorts of songs most all of us would agree are truly "folk": traditional titles like "The Bitter Withy" and "The Bonnie Bunch of Roses." Any definition that would exclude pieces like those would probably be laughed out of court. (But consider George Herzog's very narrow definition - mentioned yesterday - which was vetted and approved by folklore scholars.)

What is not so clear is whether a certain style (or any other single factor) should be *insisted on* when thoughtfully applying the "folk" label.

The good thing is that we largely agree on what is indubitably a folksong. We disagree wildly, though, about how to classify questionable cases (according to our preferred definition), and these cases always seem to exist in great numbers.

Categorizing should be a tool, not an obsession. If it suggests further avenues of consideration, it's done its job.