The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #155357   Message #3670780
Posted By: Richard Mellish
20-Oct-14 - 11:32 AM
Thread Name: What makes a new song a folk song?
Subject: RE: What makes a new song a folk song?
Sorry about blank above. The browser froze, and when I got back here that had appeared.

I thought I'd posted something about Reynardine and The Recruited Collier last night, but it seems to have disappeared.

Not a lot to add now to the comments made since then. It does seem to have been pretty conclusively demonstrated (and if someone doesn't provide a link I'll do so when I have time) that Lloyd took a poem about a recruited ploughboy and turned it into The Recruited Collier song, as part of his attempt to establish the existence of "industrial" folksong. No evidence has ever been found for the existence of the person from whom the song was allegedly collected.

So this is another instance of Lloyd adapting something already in existence, but in this case it apparently never existed as a song (folk or otherwise) until he got his hands on it.