Re Pseud's last post:

Point 1: the "Fakesong" chapter in "One for the Money" may make it clearer what the title was intended to imply - that "folk song" as generally perceived in Anglo-America is not, and can't become, an expression of class consciousness with revolutionary potential. He sometimes says folkie leftists were deluding themselves about this, sometimes he seems to imply deliberate self-promotion because the political facts were stark staring obvious. But the question of whether the raw material was sometimes bogus is very secondary.

Point 4: Roud and Bishop are helpful on this, with their comparison of Sharp with Grainger. Like Bartok, Grainger used a sound recorder and notated what it told him. Which meant irregular rhythms, variation from verse to verse and microtonality (to the point of modal modulation). And in the last point, Grainger was far in advance of his successors - try persuading anyone who sings with a guitar or in front of a band with keyboards and a sax to do it. (More - no revival singer I know of has ever tried to get inside the idiom and understand what the microtonality is doing. Here, the idioms of the Middle East and Mediterranean have 2000 years of fully conscious understanding to draw on).