Presumably the drawing-room kind, yes, but the account idealises them in the same way that 'we' would tend to idealise the Child kind.

The essential paradox at the heart of the 20th C. folk revival is that the very concept of 'folk music' only really comes into being at the point when it is identified by middle-class collectors as something threatened with extinction. The 'source singers', of course, did not use the term, nor did they necessarily distinguish between 'traditional' and 'commercial' songs in their repertoire, with the consequence that the former did eventually become extinct in their 'natural habitat', with the exception of a few outposts like Blaxhall Ship.