But, in the end, does anyone really give a shit?

On the whole I don't suppose the rank & file Folkies are too bothered with what amounts to a wholesale misappropriation of Working Class Culture for the pleasure & delectation of the more leisured classes in the name of 'revival' or 'preservation'. Personally, I think the old songs should have been allowed to die a dignified death, without suffering the indignities of taxidemy and reactionary ressurectionism - indeed, I've no doubt many of them did.

Even though I have been engaged & beguiled by such T&RR since I was 11, I think it pays to care enough to be bothered about such things, not only to give respect where respect is undoubtedly due, but to maybe enable a wider appreciation of the common heritage that is The Popular & Vernacular Traditional Songs and Ballads of the English Speaking World by those (Muggles?) for whom the very idea of Folk is, quite understandably, both risable & repellent in the extreme.

The bottom line is the old songs existed in their natural habitat without Folk; but Folk cannot exist without those songs. A similar relationship exists between sex and pornography.

I dream of cultural amnesty. How nice it would be to have a National Educational & Cultural Curriculum where Traditional Song & Ballad existed on a par with Chaucer and Shakespeare and had nothing to with 'the sort of music 'Catters like' or else the proprietary attitude many folkies seem to have to material which, in truth, they have only the most superficial relationship with & interest in. Such a relationship is counter-productive in the extreme, dimishing the value of of National Treasures by associating them with the MOR dross that mostly determines Folk Experience today. Even hardened Traddies operate at several removes from the primal sod, though (most) I meet are only too aware of this fact & deeply respectful as a consequence. For sure, the Folk Waters are muddied, and we're all guilty to a greater or lesser extent, but clarification remains a noble ideal - one that is, I think, worth striving for.

I love picking up pre-Folk books of British Ballads and seeing Sir Patrick Spens alongside Sir Richard Greenville's Last Fight.