I was browsing through a local antiques, junk and bric-a-brac shop this morning, and spotted a first edition of Fred Woods' "The Observer's Book of Folk Song in Britain", (1st edn., Warne, 1980). Only a fiver, so I snapped it up - identical copies on AbeBooks are going at £30+ - and have had great fun reading it.

Fred Woods, born in 1932, was a prominent music journalist. He died in 1995. If you want to read more about him, there's an excellent obituary in The Independent by one Valerie Grosvenor Myer (first wife of our own late Michael Grosvenor Myer) here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-frederick-woods-1609645.html

It's fascinating reading, with an excellent selection of black & white photos. How young they all looked! Some interesting observations as well - many of which would be cause for some more of the "what is folk" arguments on Mudcat! Here's a nice snippet:

One thing must be remembered, though, in any approach to folk song. The wider we throw our net of acceptance, the closer we will probably be to the attitude of the traditional musician. As we will see in the next chapter but one, the Victorian and Edwardian collectors made a fatal error in trying to fit folk song into their own predetermined theories, thereby rejecting whole areas of the total tradition. What those collectors discovered - which was an immense amount - was still only a part of the whole, and the incomplete picture they presented produced a distorted view of British folk song which is now only being cleared away."