Frank's post is, to me, an interesting description of the dynamics in Britain and the US. Manifold had been in Britain while at Cambridge in the 30s but my reading of him doesn't suggest he had quite the same sort of class consciousness as Frank describes. More particularly, Manifold seemed to regard the music of the 'workers' (often collected from informants in bars) as subversive of the dominant way of thinking in its illumination of an 'alternative' history.

He was brought up in Western District Victoria and, I can tell you, that area of Oz in the 50s was as mind-numbingly conformist and conservative as you could find anywhere, so it probably even more so in the 30s and 40s; the influx of Americans in WWII didn't have much influence west of Ballarat. Brisbane was notoriously still in the 19th century until Expo in the late 1980s and the Queensland hinterland has never been enthusiastic about social change from 'the old order'. So Manifold had a case.

Back to the topic, to limit folk music to bars, pubs, homes, or any particular environment is to rob it of its universal appeal. To keep it out of print because of some peculiar notion that it would be contaminated doesn't make sense.

This makes perfect sense to us, here and now, but Manifold was writingagainst a different backdrop, temporally and locally. Each State govt Education Dept had a fair amount of control over what kids were exposed to culturally and one or two took it upon themselves to try and get Australian folksongs into the kids and the only way was via the classroom.

Manifold was worried that the only exposure to this "subversive" culture would be via middle class practitioners; that is at the root of his comments. I suppose an analogy that might fit is to think of the "Songs of the Auvergne", a collection of lovely songs sung by the likes of Elizabeth Scwarzkopf. I love both her singing and those songs but I know the folk of the Auvergne sang quite differently. If all we ever had of the Scottish Bothy ballads were renditions from lieder singers I think we'd be on Manifold's side of the argument.

Thankfully, these days, because of print, records and 'pain in the arse' folkies (and lieder), we've got close to the best of the Venn subsets.

Cheers, Rowan