Steve: "No-one on any thread or in any book in recent years has suggested working people are incapable of making their own songs"

Jim: "This is exactly what you have done here in regard to folk songs - the only example we have ever had of "a voice of the people"
You claim that that "voice" rather than being the voice of the people, is that of poor poets doing it for money."

Sorry Jim but you are misrepresenting what has been said. The claim is that most of the collected songs were originally made for broadsides or started in the theatre etc and went from there to broadsides and from those to the folk. No-one has suggested that this applies to all the songs.

It has also been pointed out that songs made by ordinary people may have never got widely disseminated so never got collected. If they have vanished without trace we can have no idea how good or bad they were or how many of them existed.

If the "voice" that you're concerned with is that of common people making songs, rather than liking, learning and singing songs originally made by professional writers, then by all means focus on the ones that seem to best express those common people's experiences. Whether a song was actually made by (for example) a sailor or by a broadside writer based on a conversation with a sailor may be less important, but take account of that as well if you can.