Revival Folk Music is as relevant to English Culture as model railways are to our transport system or The English Civil War Society to our National Defence. We're dealing with anachronistic hobbyism; an eccentric, charming, curiosity, great fun if you're so inclined, but ultimately just a middle-class fantasy. It is laughable that Nationalists (WAV / BNP etc.) see it as having cultural currency, or actuality, at all.

I don't believe the working-class abandoned anything, just culture moves on, and tastes change accordingly; we keep moving. Whilst the Tradition Songs & Ballads came about in a very different society to our own, they are the product of the same creative forces that create all truly Popular Musics - be it the ballads collected by Francis J Child to the songs written by Ian Curtis and Mark E. Smith. I've explored this idea elsewhere (see HERE) - my conclusion being that all the Holy Cows of the Folk Revival (The 1954 Karpeles Definition, The Folk Process, even Folk Music itself) are fantasies simply because ALL MUSIC is determined by precisely the same creative means respective to the human context of culture, community and, most importantly, individuality.

Folk is a bourgeois fantasy of a working-class culture stripped of individual creativity and seen only in terms of its collectivity and plundered accordingly. In this sense CS's Elgin Marbles analogy holds true - such class condescension is exactly that which justified the evils of colonialism and is evident in Folklore Studies well into the 20th Century. Indeed, much Neo-Paganism is founded on the notion that Folk Custom and Seasonal Ceremony carry symbolic / mystical significances beyond the understanding of the participants, just as Baring-Gould believed the traditional singers couldn't possibly appreciate the significance of what they were singing.

The culture of Traditional English Folk Song was one of creative musical mastery - no different from what happens today, whatever the genre.