"jim do you agree that both MacColl and Lloyd considered Tommy Armstrongs songs Folk songs?both of them described them as such on recordings" Show me where they did an maybe we can agree, otherwise, I'm climbing out of this black hole. I've told you my position on Tommy Armstrong; the same would apply to Burns, Edwin Waugh, Joe Corrie.... and all the other poets and songwriters who were writing from the position of having been part of the communities they were writing about - if their songs were taken up by their fellow workers and absorbed into the culture, then they would have become folk songs. The fact they were part of those communities makes it possible, even likely that this would happen. What you seem to be doing here is to get some sort of confirmation that the two revival songwriters you have named can write folk songs - I don't believe this is possible for the reasons I have stated, basically that the situation in which folk songs were created no longer exist - simple as that. This doesn't mean that what they wrote was valueless - for me, the fact that people are writing songs, especially ones that use the old forms, vindicates MacColl's statement that unless new songs are written, the clubs will become museums. I guess that, out of my repertoire of 300 plus songs, around a quarter of them are contemporart - just not folk songs. I suggest if you want to make these discussions into competitions, then write to your local Comaltas representative and get them included in the next Flead - I'm cerainly not interested in pissing competitions of the type you seem to go in for Jim Carroll