Not outside the folk clubs, they're not - if they are, where are they, what indication is there that they are being taken up?
The nearest MacColl ever came to claiming that his songs were 'folk' was when he heard of the popularity of 'Freeborn Man' among Travellers - when the interviewer asked him if he regarded it as a folk song, he replied, "we'll see - come back and ask min in ten years time".
We recorded it from Travellers in very basic, fragmentary form from a couple of Travellers, they hadn't learned it, they remembered it from one of the groups singing it on the radio - that is not absorption.
Jim Carroll