flights of fancy about the origin and nature of traditional music,

To say, as I have done, that Traditional English Language Folk Song (as we have come to think of it) has its origins in the creative genius of otherwise ordinary working-class men and women is hardly a flight of fancy. That this vernacular and idiosyncratic genius also accounts for what we call the folk process is also a matter of common sense. In these songs we are dealing with a mastery of a highly specialised and refined genre - a vital and dynamic tradition of song making, singing, carrying, learning, modification and re-making. I see nothing in the collections to contradict thi; and I hear nothing in the recorded archives to contradict this either - in the singing of Walter Pardon, Harry Cox, Davie Stewart, etc. etc. I hear only idiosyncratic mastery of their time-served cultural craft; the pure drop in fact, which is something that only rarely translates to The Revival Singers, but that is an issue fir another time. We Revival Singers have chosen this thing we have come to call Folk; self-consciously, however so passionately we might feel about The Tradition. The Old Songs are master-works in the same way that the blacksmiths, ploughmen, farriers, carpenters, joiners, coopers, wheelwrights, tinkers, weavers, and countless other tradesmen and women were masters; a mastery, I fear, is all but lost to us now.

Is it a flight of fancy to say such things? If so, then - it's a fair cop, guv!