Ruth:
"?????"
Was referring to the cries of 'witchhunt' which apparently were an effort to place our boy above criticism - nothing more; we're all entitled to pro and con the argument however we see fit.
Will:
Thanks for that; for me it's what it's all about. So many people early in the revival were using folk music in the way it was always used - as a comment on what they saw around them; MacColl, Tawney, Ed Pickford… Matt McGinn in particular rang bells with me: I was an apprentice in the Liverpool shipyards when I heard songs like Swan Necked Valve, The Tea Break Strike and Foreman O'Rourke, which were saying what I was experiencing daily.
Then it appeared, (to me anyway) it all turned in on itself and became navel-gazing and private, concerned with the individuals' own particular angst rather than relating to all of us; a friend described in an article as feeling you wanted to "tap them on the shoulder and ask them for permission to come in".
I don't believe that's what folk song did; rather, it reflected the collective experience, so much so that it became relevant wherever the songs ended up. You only have to listen to Harry Cox's "And that's what the buggers thought of us", comment to Lomax after singing Betsy The Serving Maid to realise this to be the case.
Those of us involvd in this particular school of thought believed that folk song forms lent themselves to modern self-expression - that's why MacColl, Tawney, McGinn et al, composed the songs the way they did. One of the positive aspects of this as far as the clubs were concerned was that we could fill our clubs on the basis of songs that 'sounded' like folk - even though they weren't - it gave us the necessary consistency we believe we needed.
Your posting leaves a great deal of food for thought, so I'd like to come back to it later rather than end up with typer's cramp.
Jim Carroll