>What's your point - that folk music has a shelf-life and has to be replaced every so often by something that demonstrably has a far shorter shelf-life than the real thing>

Er, no. It was you, I recall, you who started up the "out-of-date" hare. My point, I think, is that there are different ways of telling a story in ballad form, whereas you seem to hold that there is only one – one that was designed for a social milieu that hardly exists any more.

You make two parallel assertions that are not really parallel:
1. that when Jim Moray or George Butterworth gets a folk song between their teeth, it becomes something other than a folk song;
2. that when Steeleye or Suibhne tricks out a ballad in pretty feathers, it's no longer a ballad

I wouldn't be rash enough to lock horns with you on 1., but a ballad, as you said yourself, is simply a narrative song, a song that tells a story. In their differing ways, Steeleye tell the story of Long Lankin and Rapunzel & Sedayne tell the story of Earl Richard. In each case I have no problem following the story. So at what point did they cease to be ballads and become merely a "pleasant sound"?

As for turning your albums into plant pots, you're just being naughty. "Old fashioned" ballad singing goes straight to my g-spot too. If I knew where you lived, I'd be tempted to break into your house and steal them. It's just that...there are other ways to tell a story.

>MacColl once said that the greatest threat to folk music was that it should fall into the hands of people who neither like nor understand it - I can see what he means?<

The whole idea of folk music "falling into" the wrong hands bewrays a "chosen few" mentality, it seems to me. Would Ewan have seen it differently if he's been around in 2011?