"It's not even a proper folk song"
Sorry SO'P, couldn't resist:
After all the arguments I have read from you in the past on what does and does not constitute a 'folk song', I have to admit that this raised a "WHAT!!!!!" this morning - where did I put your list....?
How was the Road to Damascus?
I've always thought that we didn't know where the song came from rather than it being "an invention of A.L. Lloyd", unless further information has slipped under the wire when I wasn't looking.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the mining struggles in the past and not-to-distant past,, Blackleg Miner stands as a fairly accurate description of poorly paid men doing extremely dangerous work in foul conditions, having been set at each others throats by predatory employers who were supported all the way up by an establishment more than happy to stamp them back into their place. Whoever made it, it's a vignette of genius - certainly on par with the novels of Alexander Cordell, A J Cronin and Richard Llewellyn.
Personally, I regard the subject matter as Bounty Hound succinctly described it, a piece of mining history, and far prefereable to those interminable dirges describing the bloodlust of "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable" by the 'killing for pleasure' mob.
Jim Carroll