I agree with Steve Shaw about enjoying music. I have made music all my life, though not for profit, just as a family and community activity. I sometimes do fundraising stuff for good causes, including the good cause of getting other people involved in making music.

Unlike many posters on Mudcat I came to A L Lloyd late in life, so the communist bent of his work, including Folk Song in England shines out for me, and not being a fan of Stalin or the former Soviet Bloc, it put me off. Right at the start of his book you get a lot of nonsense about how 'folk' in what was then the Soviet bloc are happily singing away their folk songs, no longer afraid of the bosses. This sort of stuff can only have come from the pen of one supportive of those regimes. I have re-read this post the disasters in the Balkans and to be honest the blithe ignorance Lloyd shows of the ethnic conflicts that must have been simmering away at the time he wrote comes across as shocking. The same applies to Lloyd's bizarre attempts to trace songs back to Russia via imagery in some Russian museum. I am with Harker in supposing that this piece of 'jackanory' says more about Lloyd's political bent than it does about how to research the history of themes or songs.

I'm just telling it as I see it.