I get the impression that Kate is regarded poorly by The Traditionalists because she dares to change the songs around, chop bits out here and there, add other bits.

Lizzie - I do not know where you get this impression from.

Let me try and explain at least part of the process to you since you clearly do not fully understand it. We now know that much of the material we regard as "traditional" comes from broadsides. As they were carried orally around the country people remembered them wrongly, misheard words forgot verses and so on and different versions emerged.

There are lots of songs out there. If you go back to the originals as collected by Broadwood, Sharp, Baring-Gould etc. then you will find that more often than not what they collected were fragments, some large fragments, some small fragments, some complete, some telling slightly different stories.

What people who write song books do is often "collate" different versions to make a "singable version" and people who buy those books sing those "collated/singable" versions.

Fine examples of this are the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs - first published 1959 and from which lots of people sing songs, and Marrow Bones, another popular collection. I mention those two books in particular because someone who was well known to Mudcatters, did the research on the new versions of those books, tracing the original versions and singers. That was Malcolm Douglas.

He would fall into your definition of "professors" I suppose though in reality for the last few years of his life he was a Post Office sorter and before that an illustrator. What he did was carefully research what people wrote, said and did, and corrected obvious errors. He was keen to see things done correctly. That is all. He couldn't have cared less what people did with songs any more those people you have classified as "traditionalists" do, because they know that songs are constantly changing and evolving.

Most singers re-write songs, miss out verses, swap verses around.

The EFDSS magazine edited by Derek Schofield has a feature on this in each edition. The feature is called "The Singer and the Source".

The latest edition focusses on a song sung by Jon Boden and Bellowhead, "The Rigs of the Time" . The article gives the version sung by Jon; the original BBC recording from "Charger" Salmons ; other versions; who sings them; which verses and in what order. It has contemporary verses, written in the the style of the song from MArtin Carthy and from Maddy Prior and so on.

Why not join the society and see what they actually have to say instead of relying on your "impressions"?

Let me try and put this another way.

As usual you are talking bollocks.