As much as I respect Bert, he did put his name, along with Ralphie, to the following piece of cultural misinformation:

'A search for the roots of jazz leads to American folk song, and a search for the origins of American folk song leads the astonished enthusiast back home to his own traditional music.'

(From the introduction to The Penguin Book of English Folk Song, 1959)

I dare say they would be astonished too, unless it was an African doing the searching, and it was African-American folk song they were seeking the origins of, in which case it might not be so astonishing at all; certainly not as astonishing as this piece of white mythologising which remains, I believe, in print to this very day.

Bert also came up with the insufferably bogus Jack Orion; as over-rated as it is over-long, but please note this is just my opinion which, in any case, I am no doubt welcome to.

Kipling jingoistic? Maybe so, but where's the offence in that? What emerges, and what Bellamy went a hell of a long way to show us, are poems that whilst being very much of their times are nevertheless rooted in a broader base of appreciative humanism that is even more astonishing to certain apologists for whom such poems as The Land and A Pilgrims Way somehow betray a left-wing bias.