"One line of thought I have had whilst reading about 'mediation' of Folk music is "have I, during the 'second revival', been conned or unintentionally misled?". I read "Some Conclusions" in the mid 1970's but, despite the convincing criticisms of it in recent discussions, I don't think it sent me down the wrong track.."

This issue is the subject of an ongoing research project that I hope one day to publish, so I shan’t say too much just yet – though I would certainly avoid the word ‘conned’. Like Sharp, Lloyd and MacColl had their own idea about what was worth preserving and working with, and in some respects their tastes weren’t dissimilar to Sharp’s – Child Ballads, modal tunes, etc. Later revivalists adopted many of the same assumptions, so we’ve arrived at a situation in which, for instance, some of the Child Ballads most popular in the revival were vanishingly rare in oral tradition, as far as we know. But this raises the important question of whether the Revival is required to be authentic, in terms of presenting a completely representative sample of the most popular songs in tradition. Harker criticized Sharp for not feeling obliged to do this, but all Sharp was doing was publishing his 'best stuff'. In the present revival, most artists performing traditional songs choose their material according to what they find the most attractive musically (often preferring modal tunes just as Sharp did) and stirring textually, regardless of their popular footprint - otherwise we’d all be singing ‘The Farmer’s Boy’ instead of ‘Tam Lin’. ‘Three Drunken Maidens’, for example, is a popular song in the revival purely because Bert Lloyd’s ‘improved’ version caught on after he’d introduced it, chiming with an emerging view of women as strong and independent protagonists. In fact it was never common in tradition – Lloyd's sleeve notes claiming that “it spread like wildfire, reaching the far north of England by the 1760's”, seem to based on a single broadside from York and just two oral versions. It’s certainly worth checking some of the claims in Lloyd’s notes, though there’s a lot of good information and erudition there too. Babies and bathwater again.