"I certainly didn't intend any of what I wrote to be patronising. In my experience it's just a fact."
Steve;
Your whole theory oozes patronising condescention.
"The vast majority of the people simply haven't got the motivation or the time to be creative in this way. The vast majority are passive and happy to have specialist people do it for them."
Really? The enclosures, transportations, the shift from countryside to city, from field to factory, from hand weaving to factory manufacture, the virtually permanent wars, the press gangs and forcible recruitings, the struggle for trades union recognitions and for the vote.... - none of this was enough to inspire the English people to get up off their bums and make songs recording their experiences and feelings? What an indolent and complacent lot we English are! Ah, but we did have a team of "specialist people " slaving away on our behalf, didn't we?
The Irish and the Scots were no different than the English, yet they recorded their lives, experiences and opinions in their songs, often in ther minutest detail, the non-literate Travellers (including the English) did so - but the English working man chose to contract the work out to the experts, if your theory is to be given any credit.
"I recently recorded an old farm hand who had written some of his own songs...."
I'm not talking about people who write songs - many of the old singers did - I think Harry Cox penned a couple (but I could be wrong). I am referring to songs composed in the communities which were taken up generally and became traditional - we recorded dozens which must have been made during the lifetimes of the singers who gave them to us; there are around ten examples of these on our 'Around The Hills of Clare' C.D. and a few on 'From Puck To Appleby' (there would have been more of the latter but in some cases the songs in question were about people still living who might have taken offence - so we were asked not to use them).
Walter Pardon gave us a number of local songs which rose directly from the re-establishment of the Agricultural Workers Union and I am sure that, if they had been sought actively there would have been many more from other areas of England - I really don't believe that the English 'people' or their circumstances were any different to the rest of the world (song-making is an international phenomenon).
"Bothy ballads of NE Scotland are a very special case. "
You've said this before - apparently on the basis that if it is repeated often enough it will become an accepted 'fact'. How are they a special case; how does the description you gave earlier differ from, say, life on board ship (you've put our sea repertiore into the hands of hack-writers), or the farming communities of England in the more remote areas over the last few centuries.
You are asking us to accept (and reject) a great deal on the flimsiest of evidence - that a few professional writers who, as you said yourself, we know nothing whatever about, laid claim to some of our folk songs.
Jim Carroll