Ewan MacColl was writing about the situation in South Africa a long, long time before the eighties, Graceland etc. Would you rather that he sang "Six Dukes Went a'Fishing" or "The Bonny Earl o'Moray" - both of those were as fiercly political pieces in their day as anything that MacColl wrote?
Also I too have never met Jim Carroll but from his posts he obviously knows his stuff and he is sad the way that folk music in some quarters is now being presented. Therefore I too reject Guest guest's assumptions.