This is a very powerful song of the coal miners I learned from Steeleye Span

Like it. Crossing over with another thread ('Source singers'), when I started performing I was utterly convinced that everyone else had learnt their repertoire from a passing ploughman, or failing that from Bert Lloyd in person, or at the very least from another folkie who'd learnt it from another folkie who'd learnt it from... To put it another way, I was convinced I was the only person there who'd picked up songs from (gasp!) records. I was eventually disabused of that notion.

Getting back to the topic, Steve Winick's article seems to suggest that Folk Song in England is basically pukka with regard to this one - if Lloyd says in FSIE that a song's traditional, then it probably is. (And if not, quite possibly not.) I haven't got FSIE myself - do other people think it might be a good place to draw a vague and fuzzy line?