Larry, I am with you on this whole Gypsy thing (which has been ignored by too many allegedly "morally and socially concerned" people for too long), and with you on the idea that music needs to have a social conscience--

I can see that some performers might not be comfortable doing music with the emotional directness of your song, but that is an artistic question--in the same way that some performers are laid back and others are "in-your-face", (Sorry to break this to you, but you're never gonna be a lounge act!!), and you should find some performers who want to have the kind of relationship with their audience that your stuff requires--

For me (though I do not perform any more), the emotional relationship with the audience is the critical thing--whether you are singing a song that has an overt message about political and social justice, or it is just about a foggy day somewhere or other--people who just want to sit like a lump in front of a room full of people and crank their way through a note for note re-creation of something folk or traditional get no respect from me at all--

As to the woman who wanted to hear the other side, I am afraid that I would have lost it when I heard that--your response song was, maybe, a tad heavy handed, but I wouldn't have taken the time to write anything down for here, I would have screamed it out at the top of my lungs, and used a few choice adjectives that I save for such occassions in the mix--

As to the folk question, you are writing in a folk idiom, you use musical figures in a way that is consistant with a tradition, and your lyrical form is consistant with one that has been used for many other such songs over time--

End of story--