But I think the arguments about genre are pointless, just as the arguments about revival and tradition are utterly futile it's like the Judean Popular Front versus the Popular Front for Judea, who is the the top dog!

Go read Fakesong and The Imagined Village and see if you feel the same way. Fact is, there is a massive disparity between Revival and Traditional culture on any number of levels - aesthetical, cultural, political, social, structural etc. - and it pays (I feel) to be aware of these even to the point of seeing The Tradition as an invention of the revival, without which the myths on which our understanding of Traditional Folk Culture are predicated wouldn't exist. As we have seen umpteen times here on Mudcat, Revival Culture sees Folk more in terms of prescription than description. Subjecting essentially proletarian / popular / folk art to any sort of academic scrutiny is always going to raise problems, but the essentially feral nature of the Popular Art itself will always resist analysis and containment, despite the patronage and condescension intregral to revival sensitivities, and despite the massive gulfs of social class which meant not just tolerance of, but deference to, those well-healed aristocrats who took such an 'interest' in the culture of the servile workers however so specious that interest was. It's an imperialistic colonial thing born of the fuedal heritage of the British class system which is cultural apartheid in all but name; indeed, it might even be seen as being as Traditionally British as fish & chips or the working-class inclinitation to defer to upper-class mores anyway if only by way of cultural security, certainly if the 'Jubilee' displays in ASDA are anything to go by.

'Hob'.

PS - The 'River-Bit' issue was eventually sorted by the building of aforementioned ASDA, which I don't own any part of.