Being a good deal younger than the average folk club goer, and as yet, still a relative newcomer to folk song, I've hovered without any certain feeling on the singing of such songs.

I wouldn't sing them myself, and (I suspect) neither would most members around my generation and younger, but I tend to accept the context in which such songs are sung as being fairly unique and isolated from 'the world at large'.

I don't know if this makes it any more acceptable or not, but I seem to have cordoned off my more personal and err modern sensibilities regarding the singing of such songs, because I see the folk world as existing in a kind of anachronistic time bubble, rather akin to 'the land that time forgot'.

Where the folk world 'meets' the real world, that bubble is burst, and as such I think has a responsibility to shake itself out of that time warp. Otherwise, I do not see it as 'my place' to pass judgement. Bit of a cop-out perhaps.

I would however be disturbed by hearing non-PC songs in a folk context, where members included the new breed of Nationalist and overtly racist style 'folk lovers'... Which raises a whole other issue. And indeed one which might ultimately necessitate that that anachronistic time bubble, is indeed fully burst once and for all.