Knock on any door, any where, and you'll be able to talk to someone - anyone - who'll be able to give the same sort of impassioned & moving testimony about the music of their life and times.

I could turn on Desert Island Discs every week and get that, too. What I don't think you or I could do is to knock on any door and find anything resembling the ubiquitous culture of participatory music-making that Mrs. Grover describes.

to use it as some sort of Exhibit A (as you have done here) turns it into a fantasy. Both mawkish and voyeuristic, it becomes a myth.

If you're suggesting that quoting those words in the present context somehow devalues their content, then you've lost me, I'm afraid. Bringing words like "mawkish and voyeuristic" into a discussion of one woman's account of real life in a relatively impoverished society smacks of the very patronization that you accuse Sharp et al of, even though I suspect you aimed them my way. They're her words - she wanted others to read them and to understand the role of songs in the "hard-working lives" of the people around her. And it was her own parents, not some prissy middle-class collector, who lamented the passing of their songs from that culture.

After all, how can these grubby so-and-sos possibly understand the significance of their own songs, much less their modal structures, analogues, origins, processes or even the purity (or otherwise) of their traditions?

That was a quote from which cultural colonialist exactly...? Even Sharp doesn't come over like that when you read his diaries (opinionated though they often are).

Liked what you said about England, though. And what matt milton said about the actual content of the songs.

PS - This is still a Fun Thread BTW...

Not sure if that means that you find the present argument fun, or that this was supposed to be a Fun Thread until the 'Bourgeois Fantasy' argument spoilt it. I'll leave you to the fun bit for now. Though I can't help wondering what that other arch contrarian Mr Bellamy might have added to the discussion...