It's interesting to note (and I'm going to be oh so BORING here), that there's nothing new under the sun! When the Folk Song Society was formed in 1898, J Fuller Maitland, Lucy Broadwood's musical collaborator in producing "English County Songs" in 1893, wrote to her about the putative committee of the society that "...the "faking" party is stronger there than we thought," and urged her strongly to ensure that she was on the committee to ensure that this faction did not hold sway. At the time it was very much the vogue for poets to take a traditional tune and harness it to words of their own construction, and then call the end result a folk song... sound familiar??

I have to say that I cannot for the life of me see how the choice of THIS particular White Hare song as a traditional one can be justified. I doubt very much, for example, if Mick Ryan would claim traditional status for his self-written song "King Kayley", even though the story it is woven around is a British folk tale (of wonderfully blood curdling and mystical nature), and it's performed in true unaccompanied traditional style.