Jim, GSS is a very good musician. i would imagine, he's a pretty good ambassador for folk -mainly doing your kinda stuff. if his beliefs propel him forward on his merry way - well really they're his business.

if you are as you say from the working classes - you will know that working class people don't really get anything you would call folk music - not the ballads, not the unaccompanied singing, the finger in the ear routine, the morris dancing. no doubt in certain rustic communities there are settlements where they dig it. Elijah Wald said as much. When he went to put amemorial in Robert Johnsons birthplace - he said people in the little village were getting layers of meaning from the songs that he didn't get. seeing jokes he had never recognised as such in the lyrics.

so what are you going to do do. just give up on the generality of humanity apart from these isolated communities....?

last night i was in a little open mic in Weymouth. a young guy called Ed Bleach(named because his hair is bleached) sang in manner that would have most people running. he was twice as loud as the presence of a microphone necessitated. and yet the wordcraft was superb, and he had so much to say about his town that was clever, compassionate and funny.

And so often I see the approved folkies flinging themselves like lemmings at songs like Sheath and Knife and bread and Cheese. and they're doomed to failure because, I don't think those song were worth preserving.