I'm committing the newly invented mudcat sin of repeating my post from above (see below--flame away or just ignore).
The discussion is going round and round definitions of class, confessions of class identity, of folk legitimacy, of who owns the music--   I'm repeating to ask:   does class have to be relevant to traditional and folk music? Or does the music have a life and relevance of its own that stretches beyond the class of a particular performer? I like to think that the long transmission of the most powerful songs attests to they way they express something that goes beyond one person at a single moment.

The repeat:
Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his poem Omeros (a retelling of the Iliad) a few years back.
Some people said: why have you, a black man from the caribbean, written a version of the Iliad instead of 'your' stories.

Walcott in a TV interview (wish I could find where he published this) said:   the Odyssey and the Iliad don't just belong to the modern Greeks, nor do they belong to the European and other scholars who've done all these studies on Ancient Greek. They belong to everyone who reads them, studies them, even learns the language.

And that reminds me of the North American versions of some of the old ballads where someone, say, rides along with all his lawyers instead of his men at arms, even while the emotional core of the story remains the same.