Well, Musket, if you were one of the tea-dance crowd who'd taken over the EFDSS at the time...
What they were really having a go at is the crew who'd not settled to who they were, singing in a cod mid-Atlantic accent one moment and an equally inaccurate Irish or Scottish one the next. And that was only part of the list of pains we faced. Who were not grown up enough to tell the BBC crew who thought English folk had to include Dylan (a point Martin Carthy makes, referring to Ewan MacColl's opinions) and thought Simon and Garfunkel's version of Scarborough Fair was both uthentic and the last word in the subject, not realising thaat what we really needed was to get back to the first word. This is why Jeremy Barlowe's work on the English Dancing Master in the late 1970s was so important, work which hasn't really been taken on yet, and the follow-up work done by Joel Cohen in Boston in the States.
I'm not saying there is no such thing as modern folk, or American folk, or trad, or whatever. What I am saying is that the journey by which we got to these was somewhat distorted between the 1930s and the 1950s, and we have the resource and knowledge to undo that and pick up again where we should be. Most of what we're doing's clearly right in any case, but it would be as well to be able to claim all our heritage. It's what the Early Music crowd call historically-informed performance, not performance identical to what the original would have been, in whatever century the song comes from, but a performance which can justify where we are now in a line of thinking and feeling descended from where it started.
It's kind of where Ewan McColl was coming from back then, just he didn't have the tools we have now nor the experience of the mistakes his followers and others made along the way. Now it's time to make our own mistakes, whether through failing to take uup the siren call of commmercial music a couple of years bak, or going that way, we are as blind now as they were then and as anyone evermore will be. All we have is the path by which we got to where we are, and to carry that on. In this, we held part of a heritage the commercial music tried to kill in the 1980s, and it's our choice whether to follow the siren song of dosh and try a professional career in the face of the opposition of those already starving in the sector, or whether we do it as excellent amateurs, which is, after all, the real nature of folk music down the ages. And so on and so forth.