It's my emerging conviction that Folk Songs were written by master craftspersons

For a lot of music we can document in minute and excruciating detail why that isn't true. There is a gradation here: in the improvised modal music of the Middle East and India, there are no tunes at all: just cadential formulas and structural principles, which the player navigates differently at every performance. There is a slightly higher level of organization in the old-style bagpipe music of Hungary and the laments of the Csango of eastern Romania (probably originating in pre-Christian southern Russia, and still performed): there is still no real tune, but the player or singer assembles thematic fragments in a somewhat-fixed order (some are just used at the start, some come in the middle, some are used to finish with - a bit more complex than that).

Somewhere beyond that we get two alternative lines of development. In the bagpipe dance music of 17th and 18th century England and Scotland, we get the same small melodic formulas reused over and over again in different combinations. There are probably hundreds of different tune names for 9/8 jigs and 3/2 hornpipes, but there certainly aren't that many distinct tunes: the usual structure of these things is in four-bar chunks, AXBY CXDY EXFY .... ad infinitum (they are very long), and it's quite common to find some of those bars recurring in many tunes. We don't have a melodic corpus here, we have a practice of improvisation by recombination (which must have been enormously useful when you had to accompany a dance that went on for a very long time). The other line of development is what you get in Hungarian song: tune families ramify into an immense number of variants with no identifiable central form, influencing each other and sometimes converging, with so much variation being introduced at every performance that you can hardly pin down such a thing as a "tune" at all, and often about all you can say is that the singer is setting the words to a melodic line in the local idiom. We get traces of that in the British Isles - who wrote the tune for "Auld Lang Syne"? Whoever it was, did they thereby also write the tune for "Comin Thro the Rye", which is almost but not quite the same? The idea of "writing" a tune make bugger-all sense in this situation.

Folk only exists because of The Revival; it's nature and continuity is defined by it

Yeah, like the kids I heard a few years ago doing the same playground games in the same Edinburgh school that Ritchie collected them from fifty years before were only doing it because of Martin Carthy. And the Black American kids Azizi hears doing the same ones must have learnt them from Dave van Ronk.

For fucksake, this is too silly for words.

It is nonsensical (and not a little arrogant) that people who have been involved in a music they recognise as folk, for many years should be asked to abandon everything they know on the word of a pair of clowns who make vacuous statements on the basis of.... well, nothing.

A-MEN to that.