I say you chaps, jolly nice weather for a spot of the old rapper dancing, what?

Still, nice to see the Flappers & Bright Young Things of the 20's weren't just doing the Charleston & jitterbugging. Reminds me of a track on And Now it is So Early (ultra rare LP of Bob & Carole Pegg singing Sydner Carter songs which can download entirely gratis - cover at & all - from HERE) called Up at the House of Cecil Sharp; sung to The Floral Dance, a stripper recalls her days dancing to the autoharp at C# house, whereas now she dances in Soho with nothing but a python on...

Honestly, Jack - watching this just underlines how utterly bogus the whole thing is. When the dancers start disappearing in the sequence beginning 1.45 we move into realms of the truly surreal, but no more surreal than these gay young fellows dancing a dance which even at the time was the traditional reserve of hard working miners embittered from the strike of a few years earlier. The classical violin accompaniment only serves to underline the absurdity. Thus Folk is, in effect, the bourgeois appropriation of Traditional Popular Culture by way of preservation - which is rather like preserving birds by shooting them for the taxidermist. Personally, it makes me want to vomit, but then again I'm pretty much an old school Class War Anarchist at heart, feeling that Folk Music is best defined by the working class people who do it (or not as they wish), not by some higher definition couched in the lingo of the intelligentsia.

A fascinating history though - and stunning cinematography on the part of the cameramen - but methinks my visits to the Wonderful World of Folk are becoming less & less the more I realise just what a pup we've been sold here.