Many thanks to Jon Dudley for that thorough account of the meeting between James and Tom Copper and Kate Lee – who, it’s clear, did not carry the title ‘Lady’ as some would have had us believe. We can now safely lay to rest the fiction that the brothers were ‘uncomfortable’ during this meeting, that they were ‘held captive’ in any literal sense (I hadn’t realised they made three visits), or that the fictional discomfort had any ‘decisive role’ in their choice of songs. As I suggested in the first place, the account given in Ross Cole’s article, far from reporting impartially the discrepancies between Kate Lee’s account and that of the family, actually misrepresents (mediates?) Bob Copper’s words, even as the author mourns that the Coppers’ stratum of society was 'denied its own voice'.

This is directly relevant to the topic of the thread, since it is my repeated experience that cultural theorists with axes to grind often misrepresent the data, and are less interested in the voices of actual people (as opposed to anonymous and stereotypical ‘workers’) than were the folk song collectors whose work they attempt to undermine. But perhaps we can move on now, and back to ‘Fakesong’ itself.