the songs you mention, Jim have taken root in your mind and a few other places.

you are deluded.
the songs you dismiss are sung along with. danced to. people use them to celebrate the great events of their lives, musicians use them to earn a living. they are living things that people use.

they adapt them and they become folksongs. the emotional property of our nation.

asfor the folk club boom, it had damn all to do with the few things going on in London. it had much to do with Donovan appearing on Ready Steady Go, Bob Dylan's song on the radio, and Pete Seeger on Sunday Night at the London Palladium tv show - and ordinary people seeing a great movement, they wanted to be involved in. and i suppose skiffle before then. but the mushroom went off in the mid 60's.

the decline started in the 1970's when people went to folk clubs and found out it was an unpredictable business. and that you might meet an entertainer like Gerry Lockran - but you were just as likely to come into contact with a traddie, who had awarded himself a licence to bore the shit out of everybody - in the name of preserving the tradition.

I'm getting to the point in this conversation to saying you can stick the tradition up the places where the praties grow. which is a pity - there some great people living, like Brian Peters and John Kelly, deeply involved in this traditional music business.

when i think of the poor devils trying to exist in a world where they have propitiate people with tunnel vision. My heart bleeds for them.

its okay for the ones who have done well, by being in on the great folk boom, or being part of a supergroup. but imagine having to engage with this bloody nonsense that the tradition exists in a world separate from Tom Jones, The Beatles, Queen, The Kinks....yeh where the praties grow, Jim!