"SO JIM,MacColl Recorded an Armstrong song in 1957 and was happy they were described thus"
Both MacColl and Lloyd were taking songs from industrial backgrounds in an effort, on Bert's part mainly, to prove there was an industrial tradition -
Many of those songs were of known authorship - you have taken great glee in the past in claiming that Lloyd faked songs, now you are holding hi up to prove the opposite, that the songs he "faked" are part of a tradition.
Albums such as Shuttle and Cage, Second Shift and the Iron Muse were displays of songs for and about Industry, not examples of a folk tradition
Some of them were new songs written by writers like Matt McGinn - no claim was ever made that they wer part of a folk tradition - just used to produce feature albums around a theme.
MacColl's work was based on helping develop singers and creating an environment in which they could sing.
Bert's scholarship was, as people have said, somewhat flawed due to his tendency to create what he could not find to make his case.
You seem very anxious to discredit my "scholarship" (I make no claim to such), yet all you provide are huge, meaningless and largely irrelevant cut-'n-pastes - largely from articles you apparently sought out to make a point.
So far you ahve failed to say where "Lowe and Grainger" fit into all this.
By the way, as said, the works of Tommy Armstrong remained relatively unknown until the High Level Ranters placed him on the map - I am unaware of any of his songs entering the tradition.
He may have been 'The Tanfirld Colliery Poet - as Joe Corrie was a Collier Poet in Ayreshire and Thomas Axon and Edwin Waugh were weaver poets in Lancashire - that doesn't make any of their works necessarily 'folk', even though they all borrowed from their various traditions to make songs - that is not to say that some of their works could not have become folk songs..
All this is a far cry from what is being argued here - basically that anything that happens in a folk club is folk.
Would that some of today's singers had the respect for the folk traditions that these poets had.
You keep crying checkmate as if this is one of your CCE competitions, yet you keep knocking your queen over.
Jim Carroll