I'm still waiting to hear which bit of Carrie Grover's testimony (or, for that matter, Bob Copper's, Walter Pardon's or many of the other singers whom collectors took the trouble to ask) you think is "Bourgeois Fantasy". Here is a first-hand account of the vital role of active singing in every aspect of life, private and social, work and play. That's what folksong is - or was. Come down from the ivory tower and listen to the people who were there.

If you want to make blithe statements like "Folk has been a fantasy construct from the off" (in a tone suggesting that this is established fact which only those with very little brains have failed so far to grasp), you're presumably going to be telling us that Broadwood, Sharp, Greig, Frank & Anne Warner, Mike Yates and all the others made up the songs they claimed to have collected? Or that Carrie Grover and Bob Copper were lying through their teeth? That those recordings on Voice of the People you so despise have been cleverly faked in a state-of-the-art studio? If not, what is your point?

"having recently read Georgina Boyes' The Imagine Village then the case seems to be pretty conclusive"

What case is conclusive? The Imagined Village has plenty of interesting stuff to say about Sharp's attempts to exert hegemony over the Folk Revival, but what it does not do is to demonstrate that the concept of folksong is a myth. Sharp's findings and theories were doubtless interesting to those seeking to create their own myth of Englishness, but to acknowledge that is not to disavow the entirety of folksong research, which of course goes far wider than Sharp.

And of course you'll be aware that Harker's academic rigour in analysing Sharp's account of his collecting in Somerset has been, shall we say, questioned.