"We wuz 'appy 'coz we 'ad a sense of community and made our own entertainment."
Sorry Bryan - don't get your point.
These songs are important because they express all aspects of human experience from the ground up - the good old days of evictions, tranportation, enclosures, press gangs, witchcraft trials, international and civil wars, strikes, shitty jobs like whaling, millwork, mining.... they're all there in the songs, which function far beyond entertainment.
There's an element of nostalgia in all of us; "It never rained when I was young" is as much a part of us as are the days we remember it pissing down.
It is the fact that these songs reflect life from a grass roots point of view that make them so important; it also makes the term 'folk' important as a reminder of where they came from and who made and passed them on.
Jim Carroll