The Revival was built on contemporary songs and writers .
Martin Carthy - Scarborough fair ( tune )
Cyril tawney - all his songs
Ewan McColl - all his songs
Tom Paxton - his songs kept many a folk club going
John Connolly and Bill Meek - all their songs
Keith Marsden - Bring us a Barrel, and MANY others with their self -penned songs brought much fun and great chorus singing.
After all - at the time there weren't many British and Irish songs to be found - we were all singing "Go tell aunt Rhody", "Take this hammer" etc etc which served us well, until we established our English Irish Scottish and Welsh roots as we have today.
Liking Folk music is more a frame of mind for a type of music ( some might say genre) rather being exclusively Traditional Music.
If we had relied on purely Traditional and 1954 definition to sustain entire evenings, we would have vanished up our own R-Soles years ago.
Spleen cringe and others have listed many people,all of whom I guess want to be admired for their writing and basically they want to be the top of the tree and dare I say - famous.
Enjoy your music,and ,whether you like the thought or not,it is a part (albeit a minor part) of the music and entertainment industry.