Jim takes a very passionate but purist view, and I entirely see where he is coming from. However if only songs which originated from within the oral tradition can be admitted, that leaves out a vast number of songs which by most criteria would be considered folk songs. The inconvenient fact is that singers picked up songs from wherever they could find them, and the songs they sang don't always fit in with our ideas of what folk song should ideally be.

A definition of folk song which disallows songs like "The Wild Rover" and "A Farmer's Boy" because of their composed and printed origins seems to me to be somewhat wide of the mark.