"I think that much heat is generated because many of us, and our friends who come to clubs but don't sing, are uneasy about being teachers, bank clerks, nurses and electricians singing sea shanties, songs of agricultural bliss and the Blackleg Miner, and we don't quite know what we are keeping alive or why."

There's an underlying assumption here that I don't, necessarily, go along with - and that is that many of us sing and play folk music in order to express our views about 'class struggle'. Although I certainly sympathise with the politically and economically oppressed of the present and of past ages this sympathy is not my primary motivation for being interested in the music. For me folk music, like most types of music, has a very strong escapist element to it (shock, horror!!). I suspect that many of the old singers and musicians kept the songs and tunes alive not to fulfill their destinies as 'class warriors' but to provide a welcome respite from their daily struggles for existence. By singing old songs, and by hearing others sing them well, I am not 'pretending' to be a plough boy or fisherman but I feel that I may be getting an insight into an older, and very different, culture from my own.
Note that many of the traditional ballads are about the doings of the aristocracy - and hence described a life which was also very different from the lives of the plough boys and fishermen who sang them.