Sorry don't get your point Muskie
There is an established agreement as to what constitutes 'Folk'
Confirmation that that agreement exists an be found in places such as Topics 'Voice of the People' and on the Roud index - both conforming more or less to that definition, or in publications such as The Greg Duncan Folk Song Collection and the new edition of 'The Penguin Book of Folk Songs'.
That the clubs don't have a consensus must strike you as a threat to the future of clubs, surely?
I people can no longer select what they listen to when they o to a folk club, only those who are already familiar with what goes on in them with go to them and when they die off, so will those particular clubs - no new blood, no future.
As I've said, the fact that so many clubs have nothing whatever to do with folk song has done immeasurable damage to the possibility of bringing new people into the music.
Bert Lloyd put it succinctly in 1967 in 'Folk Song in England':
"If 'Little Boxes' and 'The Red Flag' are folk songs, we need a new term to describe 'The Outlandish Knight', 'Searching for Lambs' and 'The Coalowner and the Pitman's Wife'."
Folk song proper is far too old in the tooth (another of your "old geezers") to re-identify itself - really do have no intention of rebinding all our books titled or referring to 'folk song' - for what - a group of peole who haven't had the nouse to find their own identity and have hijacked somebody else's long-established term to describe what they do - and then can't be consistent enough among themselves to agree what that is; the 'Hits From the Fifties' that are advertised on some club publicity as being part of their 'folk evenings' have sweet sod-all to do with snigger snogwriter compositions that some people are wanting to call folk, let alone the real stuff!
Your particular taste in music not having an identification of its own can't be good from your point of view - Calling it 'folk certainly isn't for ours.
That's the problem that needs discussing - not attempting to insert your square peg into somebody else's round hole (excuses the connotations of that analogy)
Jim Carroll