I would most heartily concur with what you are saying Dick.

Thirty years ago when i first came to live in what was a mining area (North Notts), I was already deeply into folk music.

There were very few miners in the folk clubs, which were for the main part a middle class enclave.

However there was folkmusic amongst the miners. They had taken into their hearts Merle Travis's Dark as a Dungeon - and that song that starts Its a Working Man I am.....Later on when I did a few supply contracts in the schools round here, I found they had taught all these country style songs to their children.

And later still when Thatcher was calling the miners 'the enemy within', there was a great fashion for The Dubliners led by a Selston miner/singer called Dave Guy and his band at the time Kelly's Heroes. There was at some level an identification with the hatred of British/patrician/imperialistic pomposity which thatch revelled in. Irish folk is in fact still quite potent round here in what it invokes.

This is what I can never get anybody to empathise with on Mudcat - folkmusic is visceral stuff - and it is something which happens in the hearts of the audience, and the performers. folkmusic without the folk is pretty much a nonsense.

And as for the Birdy song which people sometimes dance to, and once danced to a lot - why is it to be considered to inferior to the mazurkas, schottisches, and polkas - which nobody dances to.