Too many posters on the enormous number of threads on this topic adopt too exclusive an either/or approach. There are surely many songs which are indubitably folk songs [Barbara Allen seems to have become the exemplar of choice on here]; others which clearly are not [from Schubert lieder to the latest manifestations of the ephemeral pop market]: (these, it will be appreciated, are taxonomic rather than qualitative observations).

But there is surely a wide borderline in which occur songs which some will define or accept as folk, others not. The exact parameters of this boundary, as these threads demonstrate, may be disputed. But surely nobody would deny its existence.

Similarly with clubs. Some will adopt strict policies admitting only songs from well within the folk side of the boundary; others will be more flexible as to which they will admit from within this wide, not entirely defined border. And a few may be what I often heard Peter Bellamy denounce as "that's not a not folk club, it's an anything club".   

I would suggest that those songs within this pretty wide boundary most worthy of being included in the category suggested by the thread title will be the work of performers well-versed in the tradition, who will continue to sing traditional songs alongside, and as well as, their own compositions within the idiom. In an entry I contributed on The Folk Revival to The Cambridge Guide To Literature In English (ed Ian Ousby, CUP 1988), I wrote, "Many singers steeped in traditional song, such as Ewan MacColl, Cyril Tawney, Peter Bellamy, Bob Pegg and Peter Coe, were successful in creating new songs convincingly in the traditional idiom which the revival had brought to a wider audience". This was not meant as an exclusive list; and there are obviously names to be added since then; but I will stand by that even 26 years later as a fair exemplary list of producers of the sort of songs which constitute the subject of this thread.

≈M≈