I pulled back from this thread because I was getting concerned about words like "lies" and "deceit" being bandied around willy-nilly. Malcolm Douglas made the point on the other thread that such accusations shouldn't be made without proper evidence. However, I don't think it's sufficient to try and stifle any discussion by saying (a) "He only did what most other singers do", and (b) "He made a bloody good job of it." The point is that Lloyd literally wrote the book on English traditional song, and those of us who gained much of our early knowledge of this music from 'Folk Song in England' would like to be reassured that the things we've believed for decades are soundly based. I don't want to join any kind of witch hunt of a man that I admire in many ways, but I do think there are questions to be asked and tangled threads to be teased out.

I first became curious about Lloyd's work when I tried to find out more about 'The Cutty Wren', purely because I found it a strange and stirring song and wondered where it had come from. In his earlier writings Lloyd makes much of the performance by a certain shepherd who stamped his foot violently whilst singing it, going on to speculate rather wildly that the song was (here I paraphrase) a relic of medieval protest against baronial oppression, remarking by the by that the tune resembles that of 'Green Bushes'. Actually the shepherd concerned didn't sing it to the 'Green Bushes' tune at all - one wonders how this melody got attached to the song. Interestingly, by the time Lloyd wrote FSIE, he'd thought better of the baronial oppression stuff, and left it out. Perhaps Phil Edwards (above) is right that he was more circumspect that he had been previously when he put FSIE together.

In this context it's also interesting that, in describing 'The Handweaver and the Factory Maid' in FSIE, Lloyd refers to it only as "a broadside from the Oldham district", and makes no mention of Mr. William Oliver of Widnes, whom he told Roy Palmer was the source for the song - or at least the broadside (see Malcom Douglas, above). If my earlier speculation were accurate, and Lloyd was anxious to prove that some kind of oral tradition for industrial broadsides existed, you'd have expected him to have made much of the fact that a man in a North West industrial town sang 'Handweaver' to him in 1951.

Nor does he mention Beckett Whitehead (from whom MacColl had, Jim Carroll reminds us, collected 'Four Loom Weaver' many years previously) in his FSIE discussion of 'The Poor Cotton Weaver'. I realise that merely by stating that such anomalies are curious I am casting aspersions, but "curious" is exactly what they are.

I look forward to the definitive biography.