Sorry Richard - you'll have to explain - where is the juvenile name calling in your quote? Would appreciate clarification.
The music is 'ours' because nobody else wanted it.
MacColl, Lloyd, Lomax et al took it up, encouraged others to do so, and those who did put it on the map more or less the way they found it - no orchestration, no massed choirs - just a few adaptations to make it acceptable and accesssible - and for a long time it worked.
You don't have to be working class to enjoy it, but its a pretty safe bet that it originated and was perpetuated by the 'lower' classes.
Over the last century our sources for folk songs have mainly been land labourers, small farmers, fishermen, carpenters (like Walter Pardon).
We worked for thirty years with Travellers - the bottom of the social heap, with Irish building workers, rural labourers - they were the people who retained the songs.
It's also a safe bet that it was people like these who made the songs in the first place - who else could paint the realistic pictures of life at sea as in that repertoire, of working on the farms in the North-East of Scotland as portrayed in the bothy songs.... insiders views. Who else could use the vernacular the way it is used in the songs?
Bert Lloyd was probably right when he suggested that one of the reasons that folk songs were anonymous was that the authors were too poor and unimport to be acknowleged.
Jim Carroll