"Who's sneering, old man? "
I always know you are in a corner when you reger to me as "old man"
You appear to base your entire case that there is no such thing as folk song on the word of an obscure academic ( a breed you have consistently poured contempt on) and on the totally unprovable premise that the folk didn't make their own songs
I the process, you have totally ignored the examples given of singers who were totally aware of the significance of their songs and traditions.
Over the last year we have annotated and archived around fifty anonymous songs dealing directly with life in late nineteenth and early twentieth century County Clare - to our kowledge, none of them have been published, nor were they ever issued on broadsheets - they survived only in the mouths and memories of local people.
They include everything from shipwrecks, The War of Independance, the West Clare Railway, local fairs, markets and sports days, football and hurling matches.... to the transfering of a priest to another parish - they could only have been made , transmitted and kept alive by local people
We are hoping to add another hundred of these which have been noted elsewhere dealing with similar topics , plus the cattle rustling protests, The famine and the 1890s Land Wars - when we get them together, we hope to publish a book as a fund-raiser for our local Traditional Music Centre.
So much for your people who had no part in the making of their own traditional songs.
Jim Carroll