"I hope I may be permitted to say that they were both the same person."
Didn't know that Vic - thanks
I'd always assumed he was talking about Gordon Strachan
THe proof of the pudding lies in the eating - if you can think you can lure young people into folk clubs with badly performed and out of date pop songs mixed in with narrative songs that require attention if they are going to work good luck with that one (from what I've seen of your club from your links, it doesn't seem to have worked there
I believe, based on personal experience, that the removal of the identity of folk songs from the folk clubs drove thousands of us away from the scene and led to the dreadful contusion that surrounds the term 'folk'

John
"is in good company with any newly composed song that relates to modern events."
Of course they are and very welcome, but I can think of no pop songs that do so
The songs that did work and fit in perfectly for me were ones like 'The Hull Trawler Disaster' or 'Grey October', or Guthrie's 'Deportees', or Jack Warshaw's 'Grape Picker's Tragedy' or, on a lesser scale, Pete Smith's'Clayton Aniline' - or even the anonymous Munich air disaster song, 'Flowers of Manchester'... many songs of this ilk were regularly performed in our clubs and welcomed with open arms - I sang several of them myself
We have a friend living in our market Town, who is a member of one the great dynasties of traditional singers - a household name
He came to our house a few years ago to discuss some of his songs with a view to making a CD - Pat and I were moved almost to tears to hear his own composition about a refugee fleeing the incredibly nasty situation in former Yugoslavia
He recently told me of his admiration for MacColl's 'Fields of Vietnam' (I suspect he was drawn to it because Ewan used Robert Cinnamon's beautiful epic-sounding air for 'Napoleon Bonaparte'
For us, these are examples of traditional forms being used to create new songs
Whether they will ever become folk songs isn't in our hands, nor should it be - nobody has the right to declare a folk song 'folk" - that's the job of 'the folk'
Jim