Apologies if the thread title seems a little confrontational, but I couldn't think of a better one. Having read with great interest the "Why folk clubs are dying" thread I was intrigued by the preoccupation that many folkies seem to have about folk and its working class roots.

I know that Sharp and his contemporaries collected much of their material from working class people, and that by that point the middle classes weren't generally singing the old songs, but does this necessarily mean that folk songs had always been a product of the working class or simply that they were the only ones who were still hanging on to them at the end of the 19th century?

I know that plenty of trad songs sing from the perspective of the common man or woman, with Jack the Sailor as our hero and lawyers or the clergy as the butt of jokes, but there are also plenty with poor tailors being the victim of scorn and many with aristocratic heroes. And of course a huge number of songs with no aspect of class involved. We can speculate that "The Seeds of Love" was composed by a working class gardener, but it could just as easily have been the creation of a minstrel to sing at court, we don't know.

To me it seems unfair to assert that the middle class have "hijacked" folk music from its true keepers when we know so little about its history and origins.

By the way, I'm a librarian, and therefore I suppose a soft middle class nancy.