to be assuming that there's been no evolution in thinking over a period of 100 years: between Sharp and his followers on the one hand, and A. L. Lloyd, Steve Roud, Georgina Boyes on the other.

I said continuum, rather than consistency. Of course there's been an evolution within the movement itself, but it's essentially unchanged in terms of its social-class & its relationship to the folk-caste proper. This is stated with depressing clarity Georgina Boye's Imagined Village whilst Harker's Fakesong simply tells it like it is too, and I dare say you'll find it in the Ladybird History of Music too which even carries an illustration of Sharp's epiphany in the green house. As I say there's no difference here between Sharps parlour arrangements and the more robust renderings of more earnest Traddies such as Bellamy or Michael Grosvenor Myer, neither of whom are exactly men of the sod. The Folk Veneer is still very much one of an academic elite, in which we refer to songs by their Roud Numbers. As I said in recent review of the Roud-complied VOTP volume:

...the academic aura of VOTP [....] is (I insist) not only anathema to the working-class craft & cunning of the men and women who created the songs in the first place, but is entirely incompatible with the earthy vernacular realism of their subject matter.

This is, to myself at least, the essence of the Folk Revival as an echo of the UK class-system, whatever it's political or philosophical aspirations might be otherwise. Right or Left, it makes no difference; it is still born of the very social priviledge it perpetuates to this day in the VOTP series, the Folk Degree Course or general middle-classness of the scene as a whole. The more middle class the Folk Club, the more Traditional it's likely to be. We've got Folk Clubs over here which are so working-class Traditional Songs are anathema.

Are we downhearted??