Interestingly, some of the Child ballads have been recorded as beautiful music by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer. It's a good job real people don't share Jim Carroll's insular views. The album has, I believe, had over a million downloads on iTunes, who knows how many on Amazon and tracks appear on many compilations, including an extra session they did for The BBC.

Folk is taste you silly old man. It's a word we use in the same way as rock, pop or classical to denote a wide genre. The people at the tail end of a romanticised oral tradition are merely part of it. They captured the imagination of people who then turned it into music for a c20 audience. Provenance and to your particular taste, acceptable. To my taste, nostalgic for a folk club circuit that doesn't quite exist but if it's all the same to you, raw material in an artistic sense.

I gave a lift to someone the other day and happened to be listening to John Eliot Gardner's excellent interpretation of Vivaldi's Gloria. "Oh, you like your classical music then?" He said. "Yes" I said. Far better than trying to make pedantic irrelevant points by trying to say Vivaldi is baroque not classical.

The rewording of Jeff Beck's Hi Ho Silver Lining sung by twenty five thousand fans at the match last Saturday answers the original question. If that isn't an example of evolving in the oral tradition I fail to see what is.

I sing many child ballads but am not an academic in the subject. Why are people clapping at the end Jim? (Possibly because I've stopped singing, before anybody else says it.)