"Jim, we've been through all of this before and you have deliberately misunderstood my comments exactly the same way numerous times"
We have been though this and I haven't deliberately misunderstood you Steve
After fifty off years involved with folk son I would have to be pretty stupid to deliberately misunderstand anything and I find it extremely insulting that you should suggest such a thing
You passede off the Irish songmakers as retired people scribbling down poems, broadside hacks as revolutionaries making songs for the people, seagiong and farmeroking hacks which enabled them to come to terms with the vernacular and the work practices, English workers having no time to make songs because of pressure of work...... a series of off the top of the head excuses to explain the anomalies.... not a single shred of evidence beyond earliest
I have no intention of getting into a slanging match with you, but please don't insult me by saying I deliberately did anything
Pat and I have carried out thirty years of work with English and Irish singers, some of them still part of a living tradition.
I have presented our findings as best I can - that is what our singers told us - the Clare singers, the Travellers Walter and others.
I have not attempted to link origins with the oral tradition, so why bring it up unless you wish to throw up another smokescreen?
If you make such a groundbreaking statement which contradicts all previous opinions and knowledge, you really do need to back it up with more than insults and dismissal - anybody who claims a love of the songs and those who gave them to us owe them at least that.
Where is your evidence that our songs were made by hacks " all commercial, in other words somebody was getting paid for their production,"
You once said our folksongs were no different than those put out by music industry - now that's what I call insulting
"I wonder how much it matters."
Quite a lot to those of us who wish to understand it Vic
Jim Carroll