Rifleman, instead of ignorantly taking the piss because Richard made a typing error, perhaps you'd care to enlighten us on your reasons for what you assert.

My argument for saying that you are wrong is this: folk songs were, originally, part of an oral tradition. Oral because the majority of the people who composed and sang them were the uneducated (working)classes. The songs were their entertainment, their substitute for newspapers and, as Christopher Hill, one of the few serious historians to use the material to gain an historical perspective of the seventeenth and eighteenth century as seen from the viewpoint of the unlettered, unrepresented, disenfranchised and exploited classes, asserts in his ground-breaking book, 'Liberty Against the Law', songs were one of the few methods that this class had of expressing their opinions on their situation and the events that were unfolding around them. So the folk song as protest song has a long and eloquent history.

Certainly folk music was later taken up, and often bowdlerised, by the middle classes. But it is not their music. Being able to read and write, they had many other forms of expression at their disposal. Nor did they have the grievances to air that the 'common folk' had.

The possible exception to what I have just said may be some of the ballads. For a decription of what a ballad is, read Arthur Quiller-Couch's introduction to The Oxford Book of Ballads.

So, let's hear your argument to the contrary.