"Deja-vu, Jim. Nobody could deny what you say about rural people making songs, "
You have in the past Steve - you've written it off somewhat disparagingly.
"None of the ones I've seen made it into the folk canon though, for whatever reason."
Then you really haven't looked at them.
"None of the ones I've seen made it into the folk canon though, for whatever reason"
The "folk canon" was a definition decided on by collectors and academics desperately researching songs they believed (with some justification) were rapidly disappearing and totally without reference to their history within the communities they were found or the significance to the people who sang them.
It is an artificial definition based on thin evidence.
These songs lay side by side with the 'traditional' songs and ballads in the repertoire of those who sang them and many were indistinguishable in form - the love songs certainly weren't.
It is an outsider's analysis which has nothing to do with the communities that gave life to the songs and without having excamined them, you have no grounds for making any claims on them, yet you8 dismissed them as the scribblings of retired people.
The fact is that, though you might have traced some versions of folk songs to broadside sources, you have yet to prove that any of them originated on the broadside presses, yet, on that basis, you are prepared to disenfranchise "the Folk" from their role as song creator and that they weren't products of the communities in which they were found - even the broadside printers and contemporary witnesses, such as Isaac Walton, referred to them as "country songs".
"It is related to the slang word for journalists."
Yet another excuse among others you have afford to substantiate your theory.
It is a dictionary based word referring to bad poetry and journalism and every definition I have access to (unless you have another I've missed) refers to the mediocrity of the product - which is my point.
It is highly unlikely that the same hacks that filled volume after volume with clumsy, unsingable songs, such as Roxborough, Euing, Ashton and Hindley, also produced our folk repertoire, with it's vitality, subtlety and basis in experience.
Anybody suggesting such a hypothesis is honour-bound to produce more argument than retired old people" and re-definitions of the term "hack".
Jim Carroll