McGrath - your explanation is a bit confusing. If I'm reading your note correctly, you assume (there is that word again) that the sound will be some sort of studio construction that cannot be replicated by a listener.

Again, we haven't heard the recordings, but it would appear that the producer heard the original recording and then did "something like that yourself". How is it different if I were to pick up a guitar and sing the song myself, or if I were to INTERPRET music via some sort of electonic means. The PC becomes the instrument in the same fashion that the guitar and voice would.   The producer merely used modern technology in the "folk process". That may be hard to swallow, but I do think that is what we have here.

I'm not sure if we were ever discussing this as "folksong". Not everything that Alan Lomax recorded would fit an ethnomusicologists definition of "folksong".