I once asked you what experience you had in actual field work - you explained in your sneery dismissive way thay "you don't go in for that sort of thing" - or something equally facile.

In my time I've worked alongside several bona fide Traditional performers and observed at close quarters how what they are is very much determined by what was expected of them & they're canny enough to realise that. Why bite the hand that feeds them? I've had people confide in me to that effect and even now I get wind of a lingering bitterness on the part of certain traditional singers with respect of people making reputations at their expense. I see echoes of that pretty much everywhere I look in the folk world though obviously it doesn't reflect on me personally other than to see vernacular culture woefully misrepresented by Folkies who were only ever after one thing - a thing that was in no way representative of the rich cultural experience of the working-class communities in which I grew up.

I was related to several bona-fide & highly celebrated Traditional Musicians who represented a exceptional virtuosity of musical genius that even today is recognised as being the benchmark of their respective traditions. Loving that music with all my soul, my musical experience is nevertheless determined by a different, though definitely related, musical paradigm simply because my musical experience was Bigger Than That. Elsewhere, I've talked with 90-year-old singers about their life and traditions in the Durham Coalfield and have not encountered one single example of anything so much as resembling a folk song in their repertoires.

I've experienced enough of it to know that Folk is a myth determined by those who've defined it, synthesised it, extrapolated it from a wider condition; that Folk is a free-based artifice hardly representative of, or appealing to, the working-class of today, hence its typical demographic of graduate nerds and other enthusiasts who need the comfort of regimented pedantry and taxonomical correctness in the face of the utter glorious chaos of it all which can never be contained.

In other words... Folk is the exception to the general rule in the context of Vernacular Popular Music & Culture, prescious little of which was ever of any interest to Folkies, nor Folk to it.