As for the old ballads/songs being about nothing important, I think that is b*ll*x. They were written/ conceived about subjects that were important to the people at the time......

The subjects are still important today, Paul - their relavance & human interest is eternal. The difference is, is that they don't preach or else contain any extraneous agendas in the way a modern song would. One of my earliest experiences of folk was as an innocent 13-year-old trying to figure out what TBPWM had to do with The Plains of Waterloo, and why a singer (June Tabor) would give them equal weight in her repertoir. Even when I was 13 it was obvious that TBPWM wasn't 'real' - rather it was an excercise in mawkish propaganda and prescriptive correctness writen at several removes from its subject. The Plains of Waterloo, on the other hand, is very real - it simply tells a story emerging from the reality of human experience, not the fantasy hinterlands of subjective & self-righteous opinion.

When the protagonist of The Banks of the Nile sings Oh, cursed be those cruel wars, that ever they began, for they have robbed our country of manys the handsome man she does so from the agony of her broken heart in a plaint that few could fail to relate to by way of a broader empathy, or else direct experience - even the canny lasses who bared their breasts for the task force back in 1982 would have been weeping on the inside. Similarly: The Black Cuffs have gone away, and that will be a crying day. Remember, these songs were songs of the working people, not the intellectuals who would patronise such as idiotic misled jingoism, and write their 'Folk' songs about it accordingly.

The reality of actual experience is one of the things that define the nature of Traditional Song and tells us much about its function in a pre-Folk / pre-Revival context. Of course there are hundreds of actively political songs, ballads & anthems from pre-Folk / Revival days reflecting the issues of the day. To the historian such songs can operate as Primary Source material in a way TBPWM never could (unless as a more ironic commentary of the mores of the folk movement as a whole). It does good to look at such songs - be they Chartist, or Cornlaw, or even the more explicitly political songs of the master trad. balladeer, Mr Tommy Armstrong. Unlike TBPWM, such songs arise from a deeper sense of experience & relevance, thus do they offer us something very real.

Apart from anything else though, like a lot of modern anti-war songs, TBPWM as patronising as it is ultimately disrectful to those who gave their lives in good faith. I will not judge their sacrifice to be in vain even with the benefit of hindsight. To them - heroes all - I will doff my cap eternally & will wear my poppy with pride in the knowledge that war is a reality, and that it is thanks to such heros that I owe my very life and freedom to pursue happiness in the here and now.

Once again, as so often in Folk, it's a matter of favouring Description over Prescription. In Folk, from the 1954 Definition to TBPWM, prescription invariably obfuscates the beauty of the obvious.

IMHO, naturally...