You keep suggesting this idea, Iain, that stories (or folk tales) are 'passed down essentially unchanged'. In my experience I find this quite wrong. IMO stories vary verbally just as much as songs or ballads as they are passed on. Just one example, Snee Vitchen und der Sieben Dwarven (excuse spelling) comes from the same root as 'Goldilocks'. Not many people know that, but think about it. The characters have changed and G is much simpler but it's the same plot told in very different ways. Similarly 'Tom Tit Tot' is essentially Rumplestiltskin but the wording is as different as 2 versions of the same ballad.

The concepts in the 54 are quite simple and easily digested. I don't have a problem with the continuity element. I agree it hardly needs stating in light of 2 and 3.

Your 2b is quite right and should have been included (See later historical comment).

I agree there is no compulsion, which is why I refer to them as descriptors/guidelines, rather than hard and fast principles. They are very likely to happen but they do not stop a song from being part of the process when taken individually.

Surely 3 can't be argued with. It stems from the Darwinian evolution thesis of the survival of the fittest, putting it crudely.

By mentioning what happened in the 60s and today with newly created folk songs you are falling into Jim's trap of using 2 quite different meanings of folk music. The use of the word when applied to oral tradition is only part of the meaning when applied to what is perceived by the words in today's world. You can't apply the same rules to both. What sounds like folk is part of the modern day wider meaning and the 54 descriptors were never meant to apply to this.