Hello Everybody.

On the air 'The Unfortunate Rake'; if you look at a post above I cite a source which guessed that the song 'The Unfortunate Lad' might originally have been sung to the Irish 'Unfortunate Rake' air, but if I recall aright, when I looked into this that 'air' has several names and its national origin appears uncertain. Is this what Jack Campin is saying?

Jim, sorry to spout jargon which I only half understand. By dialectic I meant the idea a la Monty Python that history is the history of class struggle. So on some arguments, folk music produced by the working class would be part of this struggle and reflect the interests of that class. If it turned out that all 'folk music' has been produced for commercial purposes by hacks etc then maybe it would be more difficult to see it as expressing the working class (except that one bit from Mayhew I read about a 19th century hack suggests that they too were badly paid and exploited! Pity we don't have 'The Lament of the Underpaid Ballad Writer' as a folk item, that would wrap it up nicely!


Thank you for the material on St James in London. It was just about still in existence when the major syphilis outbreak in Europe happened. But there's no evidence it ever functioned as a syphilis hospital.


My theory is that those 19th century broadsheets came out when they did and mentioned lock hospitals because of the concern leading up to the Contagious Disease Acts, which were contemporaneous. And they took the idea from an extant song, which we have as 'The Buck's Elegy'.