WLD,
As you say, there is a gap between 'ordinary' folk' (whoever they are) and the folk themselves, though it wasn't always as wide as it is now. When I first started to go to clubs I was an apprentice electrician working on the docks in Liverpool and me and a friend, ( a warehouseman at the fruit market on Scotland Road) stumbled on The Spinners Club by accident.
At one time The Singers Club audience was a mix of working class people and others, and that only changed when the scene generally started to decline.
Some of Ewan and Peggy's songs never connected with the people they were writing about, but, from my experience, the people I was working with were never weaned off what was being fed to them/us by the media.
Having said this, songs like 'Freeborn Man', 'Thirty Foot Trailer', 'Manchester Rambler' and 'Dirty Old Town' seemed to ring bells (interesting thread on the latter at the moment).
I have to say that after thirty years in the building trade I have met very few, if any, house painters who have read 'The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists' or 'Confessions of an Irish Navvy'; I wonder how many miners read 'The Citadel', or textile workers, 'King Cotton' or 'Love On The Dole'.
I believe this is very much down to a failure on our part to sell our goods, also on the grip that the establishment has on our culture, rather than a comment on the goods themselves.
Jim Carroll
PS Which of your songs was inculded in NCS?