'.....how much we are indebted to all these people who were driven by an evangelical belief.
Cap'n,
Neither MacColl nor Lloyd could be described as 'evangelical communists' as far as I remember them. Certainly both were on the left, but I can't remember them ever peddling a 'party line' - often it was quite difficult to spot Bert's politics - in fact, he was usually 'all things to all men'.
The early (present) revival owes its existence largely to the support it got from the left; The Worker's Music Association was the forerunner to Topic Records.
Singers like MacColl and Lloyd believed, as I do, that the songs we call 'folk' were made and transmitted by the 'lower' classes (for the want of a better word). The sea songs were obviously made by people who had a working knowledge of the lower decks, and the soldiers songs smack of lower-rank experience. Could anybody who hadn't experienced farm life have written the bothie ballads? I doubt it.
I firmly believe that the great body of our (anonymous) folk songs were the creation of the (largely agricultural) working classes.
There has been much activity in the past in trying to discover who wrote 'the ballads', pretty much without success so far, but for me they smack of vernacular speech, humour, experience and observation and are fairly obviously of common origin.
Even if they came from the pens and the heads of 'the educated classes' as has been occasionally claimed, it was the uneducated labourers, weavers, miners, Travellers who put them in circulation, adapted them, created many versions of them and made sure they didn't die off.
One thing I definitely got from working with MacColl was a pride in my own origins - there - I'll put my soap-box away now.
Jim Carroll