" Walter Pardon claimed antiquity for his own invention."
Walter never "invented" a song in his life, and it is the slanderous dishonesty of statements like this that has debased this discussion throughout.
Smacking each other around in these dog-fights is par for the course, but deliberately setting out to insult the people who not only gave us the songs we sing, but who are no part of any of this, is a cowardly way to behave in order to score some sort of point.
I've always found the grave-dancing that takes place whenever MacColl's name is mentioned distasteful, but he spent his life sticking his neck out and he usually gave as good as he got.
Walter, on the other hand, was a kind, gentle and generous countryman who never gave offence to anybody.
He was born into a family of traditional singers and assimilated many of their songs while growing up.
When the singers in his family died, he began writing down their songs in notebooks and he learned to memorise the tunes on a melodeon,
He kept them alive because he considered them important and when his nephew, Peter Bellamy's tutor, persuaded him to put some of them onto a tape, he welcomed Bellamy, Bill Leader, Fred Dallas, and others into his home so they could be recorded - the end result being that those of us in the revival received a magnificent gift of a hundred or so of his songs, many of them unique, most of them beautiful and extremely singable.
Walter never invented a song in his life, most of them were old, some of them are of great antiquity, particularly the ballads.
Accusing somebody like Walter of dishonesty and "invention" is beyond belief - I can only hope you are a one-off Muskie, if there are many others of your kind in the revival, the music really doesn't stand much of a chance.
You really should be ashamed of yourself, though I doubt very much if you are
At least one other contributor to this debate has accused the older singers of being dishonest attention-seekers, in order to promote his rather strange and often impenetrable agenda, but you really are something else.
Jim Carroll