BTW, the reference I made above to uk.music.folk involved a fairly recent thread wherein Dick Gaughan challenged Ian Anderson's claim (my paraphrase here from fallible memory) that the Celts were getting more attention than they deserved. It summed up this whole argument rather neatly for me.

So I went to google.groups to check the archive, and I can't find the thread in question, of course. Both men are somewhat prolific usenet contributors, and I've just not got the time to keep looking. I do wish I'd saved the exchange, however. See how useful it would be now to quote the two of them on the subject!

What I did come across though, was an interesting thread on how historians view folk song, which is something of a side issue to this one. The argument that it is only one community striving for accuracy about the origins of songs is misleading, I think. There has never been a tremendous amount of accuracy among folk music scholars, most of whom have been amateurs, not professional academics, with an entirely different agenda. So I'll quote a good post from Dick Gaughan here, which may illuminate the bigger issues at work here for some.

Quote from Dick in the following post.