If there were a lot of industrial folksongs that haven't been collected, we can partly blame Sharp and his generation, and his next generation, Kennedy etc.
If there weren't, it would be an interesting thesis for someone: why werent there?

A interesting question. And one that, at this spatial and temporal distance from the dark satanic mills, I can't really attempt to answer. I have heard it argued that mill owners established the original glee clubs in England's industrial areas during the mid 1800s, partly to keep the workers' minds off thoughts of activism but I don't know whether there is even any (let alone how much) truth to such a proposition.

But it is also a question I have pondered in an Australian context, where most of the rural songs collected by Meredith et al. (and I know Dick has a copy of Manifold's collection as published by Penguin) give the impression that sheep and cattle were the main rural industries in pre1950s Oz. My first question, on reading such collections was posed only to myself at the time and was "Where are all the dairy farmers' songs?" Apart from the Cockies of Bungaree, songs by or about dairy farmers have been a bit thin on the ground until Peter Pentland wrote "My Beaut Little Fergie Tractor" and a few others in the 1970s.

The nature of the question was prompted by my patrilineal line being mostly dairy farmers in South Gippsland; they certainly knew how to enjoy themselves and several from my extended family toured that area (and adjoining areas) of Victoria as The Holmes Family Orchestra, playing a (more or less) chamber music ensemble for concerts and dances. For a while I thought that dairy farmers didn't have much spare time for songmaking but then I discovered the family history about the orchestra. Perhaps dairy farmers were isolated from the (largely class-based) arguments between squatters and other pastoralists or the similarly based arguments between bosses and shearers. I haven't yet pinned any satisfactory hypothesis. Perhaps, if Bert's sojourn in Oz had included a lot of time among dairy farmers, we might now have some.

Sorry for the thread drift, South Gippsland used to have anthracite collieries at Kongwak and Wonthaggi but, apparently, no songs from them until John Warner started writing some recently.

Cheers, Rowan