Hello Jim

As usual, your post covers a range of issues.

I am afraid I do not agree with the comment in the post above and elsewhere to the effect that for over a century people believed that the working person wrote 'folk songs'. I have quoted what Child said on this a number of times. The picture is more complicated than this, something Roud helps us to understand.

Songs are not 'social history'; history is basically the study of the past. Songs may be 'historical sources'. As such, they may be reliable or unreliable, biased in various ways and so on. For example, one would be unlikely to come to a full understanding of the cotton famine's causes and effects by reading the dialect poems about it that have survived.

I also agree with those who have pointed out that writing ballads is 'work' and was therefore done by 'working people'. I see no reason, in fact, why ballad sheets should not be used by social historians, and I know that they often are. Once again, there is much of interest in Roud.

It seems to me that arguments about the literary merits or demerits or the 'singability' of broadsheet balladry, especially when contrasted with the merits of 'our' folk songs, are aesthetic judgments, not historical ones. They seem difficult to maintain and prove, especially when the earliest known versions are broadsheet ones. You'd end up saying 'The people can't have written that, it's unsingable rubbish.' or 'I don't have an early version uncontaminated by print, but I'm sure it would have been much better than this.'

You write: It also meand, of course, that working people have always been recipients of (even customers for) our oral and musical cultures and not participants in their making.

I don't think it does, though in the sense that the Christian religion, for example, which influenced working people immensely, took off because a Roman Emperor was converted to it, and then there were centuries of political influence wielded by the Christian Church across the whole of Europe, then, yes, plainly the working people of this country have to a significant extent been 'recipients' of culture rather than making it.

Using the mid twentieth-century term 'pop song' in this context is, for me, an unhelpful anachronism. I am interested in the history of what ordinary people heard and sang, and since this plainly included a lot of the commercial or popular music of the day, than that is part of social history and it is worth writing about.

I would rather read Roud's account, based on written evidence from the times in question, than vague waffle about 'shamanistic duels' of the sort one encounters in connection with Lady Isabel and the Elfin Knight (there has recently been an interesting thread on that song here). Or stuff from Lloyd trying to argue that the song has its origins in one of the communist countries whose regimes so admired.

I don't think anything I have said invalidates the collecting work done by Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie or renders their lives 'wasted'. I think it might be just a tad over-dramatic to see it this way.

I found a Henry Boardman song on Spotify. He plays that old traditional English instrument - the banjo! And not particularly well.

To Guest (4.37) The "why" is tricky. The Americans devised the term 'the intentional fallacy' to describe problems in this area; the French pronounced that the author was dead not long afterwards. There are two points here, I think. First one can never know for sure what a person 'intended' and secondly,

To Jack: I agree with a lot of what you have said.

And I have now promised myself not to go round this particular circle again.