There are also quite a number of the rural songs that are implicity pro-establishment - they sing of accepting the daily duties with good will, enjoying the simple things of life (when that's all you can afford anyway,)thanking the farmer for his benificence at the harvest supper, etc.

I know that many of the old songs deal with a way of life that no longer exists in any class now. But the best of them have at their centre something that anyone can respond to, whether it's weariness at the end of a working day, celebrating high days and holidays, welcoming the spring or summer, being reunited with a lover who's had to be away (men still go off to fight and women at home still wait for them), despair at being abandoned by a lover, distress at an unwanted pregnancy - it all still happens, albeit in a somewhat different social setting. And the relevance of such universal themes is not limited to any one class.

Marje