For what - are you suggesting that the songs aren't worth singing?

Odd one really, given the overall slow-tech / lo-tech societal context in which these things arose - their natural habitat if you like. Things move on, things improve, things fall away with certain inevitability & popular / vernacular musical experience reflects that. On a basic level Folk as a concept reacts against modernity by postulating a more pastoral authenticity which defined the whole 60s / 70s aesthetic, and still does , be it in the clubs as a whole or on more weird margins, however so ironic that might be by way of a more self-conscious post-modern hauntology that underwrites much of Folk has become. We're all part of the modern world and Folk functions as a conduit to a pastoral dreaming enshrined in the old songs and the old singers thereof, whose mastery is, I fear, all too often overlooked by a revival either hell bent on improving things or else operating on the conceit that it is somehow keeping the tradition alive, which is not just utter bollocks but ultimately disrespectful to the working-class men and women who made and sang these songs as part of a life less ordinary.

I personally have largely stopped singing the old songs out of an increased sense of cultural awkwardness with respect of this. Even if a folk club is 100% trad, you're not going to be hearing Traditional Singing, just a load of middle-class revivalist hobbyists having a good time at the expense of a culture from which they're a million miles removed in socio-economic terms. I've had to move away from folk clubs, singarounds and other DFCs to get a renewed sense of just what it is I love about the old songs anyway, and whilst I can applaud the efforts of collectors and collators and curators in preserving the stuff of The Tradition in terms of transcriptions, field recordings and Broadsides (which ARE at the very heart of the thing, despite being often dismissed here as being 'Commercial') I'm less convinced by the revival performers who have made these songs into something very different from what they were.

But this is all very personal, like I say. Do what thou wilt and all. BUT. I think it was Martin Carthy who said the worst thing to do with these songs is NOT to sing them, but my feeling is that they've been sang to the very point of meaninglessness in an artificially extended lifetime when they should have died the death long ago, which, in a very real sense, they did.