Brian Peters "some of 'Industrial Folksongs' cited by Lloyd and others may not have been sung as widely as the rural folksongs that turned up all over the place."

Considering the context of the thread - this isn't really drift!

A lot of 'rural' stuff is 'one-off': to some people that means it's 'rare': to another it means that only one silly bugger throught it was worth remembering long enough to be collected (e.g Who Owns The Game?). Many songs in the revival over the last 40 years may well have enjoyed a far greater currenct than they did when first created - the same is true of morris, and urguably many 'traditional' dances.

Bert was one of the primary creators of the folk revival - sorry, that should be the mid-to-late-twentieth-century-folk-song-revival (see Harker - but carefully - for some others).
He had political motives - so?
He re-wrote songs - so?
He created songs and tunes from various sources - so?
He wasn't entirely up front about what he did - that is what, from an academic perspective, dis-credits all the rest of what he did - so?

Tom