No retraction, Michael. Just out there (in the real world), the distinction is ultimately meaningless; just as in here (in the folk world), the distinction is debatable despite it being one of the shibboleths of the entrenched Revival Orthodoxy, none of whom (least of all yourself) I would I ever expect to agree with a more radical perspective. Forgive me, I've just re-read Dave Harker's Fakesong (OU, 1985) and agreed with every word - especially the bit where he talks about favouring description over prescription.

In the Life, Art and Example of Louis Killen he gave equal weight to the substance of material generated by the perception of The Tradition, whatever the mechanics of that Tradition are believed to have been. And just as The Shoals of Herring was written, then so was The Blackleg Miner - and subsequently set it in stone and sourced (if I remember rightly) to a nameless singer in Barnard Castle. Two points here:

1) Barnard Castle is geographically & culturally far removed from Delaval & Seghill, and whilst many miners were indeed peripatetic, in the Durham Coal-field there are far more extreme examples of milantism than anything you'll find in Northumberland. We might think of Chopwell or Stanley which were notorious in their day. Even to this day they have streets named after Marx and Lenin, who along with Kier Hardie, are proudly depicted on the banner of the Chopwell lodge of the NUM. You won't find anything quite as radicalised in Seghill or Delaval - indeed, the recent death of Lord Hastings has brought to an end over 900 years of a familial feudal continuity going back to the Norman Conquest.   

2) I grew up near Delaval & Seghill and had many friends and family there across the years & generations of my childhood. I always found it interesting that whilst my middle-class folky school-teachers were fond of playing us the Steeleye Span recording of Blackleg Miner in order to tell us about Our Folk Heritage, no one out there in the Real World - none of my friends or family who included very real traditional singers & musicians - had actually heard of it. In recent years we've come to know why that is - because A L Lloyd collected it from the Piltdown Man.

Whatever the case, the fact remains that both of these songs are absolutely crucial to the political weight of the Folk Revival, and were rightly sung with equal passion by Louis Killen. The recordings I've linked to are legendary in the very emotive sense of that Tradition irrespective of who wrote them, and why. I notice that The Trimdon Grange Explosion has a Roud Number (3189) despite the fact that we knew who wrote it (and on what occasion) and regard his song-craft as every bit as gifted and politically pointed as that of Ewan MacColl, who was born 5 years before Tommy Armstrong died. I wonder, will Shoals of Herring ever get a Roud number?

Louis Killen was possessed of a crusading cultural zeal, as I recall it, and have never forgotten it, vividly, down the years right up to when I last heard him sing in a singaround at The Cumberland Arms in Byker maybe 5 years ago. Part of that - a huge part of that, I'd say - has to be the aforementioned inclusivity of material to the cultural, political & human cause of Folk, which is its very life-blood and from which we may draw strength.

Where I belong, grown men weep to sing these songs - and we have Louis Killen to thank for nailing them with the definitive mastery which will, I'm sure, outlive the whole bally lot of us.   

Louis Killen - The Trimdon Grange Explosion