""Folk is a myth predicated on a Bourgeouis Fantasy of working class culture"

There's another point to be raised with regard to this assertion: a lot of folk songs voice working-class fantasies about bourgeois culture. Especially in their details: all those down-soft pillows, milk-white skins, pure-breed horses, fine silk clothes etc etc.

A.L. Lloyd's writing is great on this in 'Folk Song in England'. In fact, really, Suibhne - if you haven't read this book then you should - as it's a very class-conscious analysis.

It strikes me that there's a risk here of losing sight of the actual CONTENT of folk songs: the words and the tunes. The way folk was presented and disseminated and collected (and the people that did that collecting) is by no means the same thing as the songs themselves.

So much of the content of so many folk songs rings very true to me precisely because it actually seems very contemporary, not of the past. That's why I mentioned Alasdair Roberts. The aforementioned working-class fantasies about luxury goods and romantic lives of the super-rich have a direct counterpart in today's Hello-magazine style culture of gawping. That is but one aspect of folk-song content which doesn't seem remotely compromised by any prissy mediation by any middle-class folksong collectors.

The Bothy ballads would be another excellent example: the sarcasm, wit and boss-hatred in them exists in an entirely different atmosphere to the William Morris-JRR Tolkien-waistcoat'n'ale breed of psych-folker. I hear 'The Day We Went to Rothesay' and Arab Strap's "First Big Weekend' as near-identical twins.