More gratuitous contradiction from our dear Jim, bless his little cotton socks - but in his own archives rest assured every song is meticulously provenanced. I doubt a provenance might ever extent to cover an entire song type such as those you mention, but I'm sure you've got specific instances in the vaults there, Jim, with the name of the singer and the date of the recording and all variations duly noted.

Fatuous observation? Bollocks. It's sound historical method! When I'm raking around in car-boot sales & flee markets and even my own family archives I often pick up un-marked photographs and wonder, who are they? Where are they? When are they? If that info has been written on the back how much more meaningful the images become. All it takes is a few words: Billy Pattison, Boca Chica, Cambois, 11th September 1939...

And WTF's Gaia got to do with anything anyway? Can we leave the New-Age Ecological fantasising out of this? Music is of HUMANITY - along with motor cars, power-stations, chemical works, farming, fishing, industry, plastics, mining etc. etc. without which we wouldn't be typing our little love-letters to one another on PCs and lap-tops the world over. As a confirmed Gnostic I believe nature to be intrinsically evil, Gaia likewise - thus might I offer Blake's maxim that Where man is not, nature is barren! And I'm sure it was Huysmans who once said something like Nature might have given us the Trees, but Man, sir, Man invented the Steam Engine!.