The reason this gets so silly is that because of various glitches and twists in hostory, the poor abused "folk" has been tortured and torn and stuffed into at least four unique meanings, and these get sluing around as if they were only one, or two. This generates endless bales of cognitive dissonance and gigabytes of "shorty" file content.

1. Folk means, oeioke in general.

2. In an era when a small number were highly priveleged, and a very large number very under priveleged, "folk" meant the people who were not priveleged, and therefore not as a rule educated in formal musical traditions.

3. Therefore folk also came to mean the music generated by laboring people, usually of an uneducated sort using simpler themes, basic stories, recurring basic structures like 1-4-5, etc.

3. When the feudal model gradually gave way to a rising middle class thanks to technoloical and philosophical advances it became necessary to build an endlessly expanding classification system to provide libraries and other forms of information for specialized professions, and a more populous reading class. In categorizing things, the word "folk was used to describe all kinds of music that seemed generally related to (2). This was gradually extended to a fourth definition of broader classes of music similarly built or expressing similar sentiments.

There are various intersections of these four balls of meaning, but given that people bounce around among them fairly freely it isn't too surprising that agreeing on what "it" means is a rare event.

A