Malcolm Douglas:
At last the cavalry has appeared on the brow of the hill. Thanks. Sorry about the nom-de-plume, but having been compared with the 'secret police' for making a few points about traditional song, I'm rather glad I kept my real name out of this. Wish I'd chosen a nom-de-plume with fewer bloody characters, though.

Mr. Red:
"Unless we lived and endured in the cultral environment of which we speak we cannot imagine the strictions and mores that straight-jacketed that society."

I'm sure you're right, and I wasn't trying to. Just looking at the actual songs.

Les in Chorlton:
"And please stop shouting in that self-rightous way."

Er..... You wanted to know more about me, so I told you. Whoops, I'm not the right-wing idealogue you seemed to be suggesting! For this you now call me "self-righteous". Sometimes you just can't win.

I *thought* we were actually having a reasonable debate here, with interesting counter-arguments - that I've been happy to acknowledge - and none of the "personal abuse" you predicted in post 12. That, and your two subsequent (entirely personal) posts, however, lead me to suspect you're trying to fulfil your own prophecy.

OK, I'll have one more attempt to explain why I think this is important, and why it's relevant to the concept behind the thread title. Then you, or anyone else, can tell me which bits are wrong.

My understanding of the repertoire of English traditional song, as represented not only by Sharp and his contemporaries, but also by more recent collectors and traditional singers I've heard in person and on record, is as follows: Lots of songs about love and/or sex (more than two thirds of the 'Still Growing' book, for instance). Plenty of crime and punishment; songs about war, from the jingoistic to 'lost lover' laments; songs of work (often expressing a pride in a particular trade but sometimes the hardships too); drinking songs; hunting songs. Some old ballads, yes, but ones about 'faeries' either long gone (Tam Lin) or boiled down to exclude entirely any elfin antecedents (Outlandish Knight). A few songs describing poverty (and I will cheerfully add to the list Here's To My Tin and Riches to Poverty, also from 'Still Growing' - although the latter might be an example of schadenfreude) but these often come with unlikely happy endings (Thresherman) and seldom make a political point. That doesn't mean that people were neither poor nor suffering, simply that there is little evidence that they wanted to sing about it.

Then along comes the 'folk revival' of the 1960s and beyond. Its chief protagonists were performing for largely urban, often well-educated audiences, and had social and political ideas of their own. They imagined their own version of 'The Village', something edgier and more challenging. Out went the soppy love songs, the jingoism, the forelock-tugging. In came a greater focus on songs which did contain social comment (poaching songs, for instance, providing a reminder that the legal dice are forever loaded against the poor), and down from the shelves came the copies of F. J. Child and an exploration of Tam Lin and all those other wonderful tales. Sometimes the traditional song as collected didn't quite tell the desired story, so some tweaking of words or melody could be employed. Old broadsides or poems were dug out and set to music as a way of establishing an 'industrial song tradition' and of course new songs were written.

Nothing wrong with any of that in itself. It's probably what I would have done in that situation. The problem arises when people try to extrapolate backwards from the late 20th century version of 'The Tradition' to make some kind of sociological or historical comment on the past. For example, the song familiar to many of us as 'The Handweaver and the Factory Maid' is actually A. L. Lloyd's collation of several different collected versions, telling a rather different story to any of them (the factory maid is depicted in one of those originals as the social superior of the handweaver). As a song, Lloyd's piece is excellent, but it would be unwise to draw any conclusions from it regarding social mores in the 19th century.

By the same token, when the press release for a new CD paints a picture of the English tradition as a bizarre combination of Engels and Tolkein, as filmed by Hammer, and suggests that Cecil Sharp ignored all the real meat because he was an Edwardian snob obsessed with jolly shepherds, then I feel the need to stand up and say: "It ain't true". If most of you on this specialist music forum don't think it matters, then God help you.