It's worth noting that some of us like song scholarship. If you don't know or care where you got a song, I'm not likely to want to bother to listen to you singing it.

It's a matter of taste. But it's also a matter of history. Ignorance of the past leads to... well, for one thing, it leads to politicians who keep slapping tariffs because they don't know that we tried that in the nineteenth century and it didn't work nearly as well as the tariff-makers claimed; it just meant that American industries remained inferior to European for a long time.

Of course most people don't care about song history. I know I'm a freak. But knowing a song's history never hurt and sometimes helps.

As someone observed, we'll never resolve this as long as this forum covers all aspects of "folk" from navel-gazing to traditional ballads. But at least let's recognize that there is a distinction in what people like.