SS
The more I read your posting the angrier I become.

"In working with Seeds of Love last autumn for my Naked Season album……."
So you got your 'road to Damascus' conversion as long ago as last Autumn?   Some of us 'patonising folklorists' annd researchers have been screaming our message about the creative abilities of our source singers from the rooftops for the greater parts of our lives, largely to deaf ears. The response we often got was summed up nicely by our gun nut friend on this thread a few postings ago:
"I still say play the bloody music and stop rabbiting on about in dusty archives, digital or otherwise."

When we attempted to get our message across, quite often we were greeted by yelps of 'Folk Police', or 'finger-in-ear', or more recently, 'woolly jumper' (have to say, that's a new one on me – never been called one of them before). Childish names such as these (not so much schoolyard childish – rather Lord of the Flies childish) are designed to silence the dissenting voice and quite often manage to make the lives of the dissenters uncomfortable and pretty miserable.
When we ask for real folk music at our folk clubs we are told that 'If we put that sort of stuff on we'll scare away our audiences' – now there's patronising for you - towards the audiences who, it is believed, can't, or won't take the real thing (oooo, those long ballads, how frightfully boring!!!). And doesn't it show wonderful confidence in our traditional music eh???

We didn't always get it right, but at least we PFs got up off our folkie bums and went and found what our few remaining traditional singers had to say. As far as possible we made our findings available to the general public and we (dustily) archived our material with full public access. We even managed (often out of our own pockets, or by relying on the generosity of fellow enthusiasts), to make some of it readily available on CDs.
I presume you were one of those who availed yourself of the wonderful Robert Cinnamond album recorded by that 'patronising folklorist' Sean O'Boyle which was issued by Topic some 3 decades ago (I believe that the sales never made it into three figures).   Or how about 'Bonny Green Tree', the album put together by another 'patronising academic', Tom Munnelly, from his recordings of John Reilly, the Traveller who gave us The Maid and the Palmer (usually referred to as Christie Moore's The Well Below The Valley). The sales of that one were pitifully small, John Reilly died of malnutrition in a derelict house in Boyle and The Maid and the Palmer was copyrighted by Phil Coulter.

And what do you offer in place of our 'dusty folklore'? A Tinkerbell world of 'anything goes – as long as it's in 'a designated folk context', where the real folk songs, quite frankly, are not welcome.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Jim Carroll