Anyone else noticed the sanitized version of 'Rollin'the Woodpile down' performed by Bellowhead on the BBC awards show recently ?

I don't see why Bellowhead doesn't just write their own song rather than do this. The style, the context, the timbres, the spirit, etc. are all very different than that of the older song. But that would be par for the course and dandy for a "cover song" if they were at least using the lyrics and melody (read: the parts narrowly conceived to entail "the composition" in the Western commercial music worldview) of the older song. But they're not even doing that. Who knows what hand-me-down of a folkie source they are getting it from either, and yet they go even further as to change melody and lyrics significantly (IMO).

The is of course nothing "wrong" with doing that. I just don't see the point of taking just a tiny speck of a whiff of something old/"traditional"... Is that whiff so compelling that one couldn't possibly make up their own? Or is it all just a formality, to say that - in some tokenistic way - one is taking a nominally "traditional" (well, it's a coon/minstrel song, but they might think it's "English folk") piece and "modernizing it"? -- so as to say, "Look, we are very English and very 'folk' in our identity because, umm, see: folk-song. And yet look, we're hip too because, erm, electric bass! And how dare you call us up on what we do cause, like, folksong is always changing, man." !

Don't get me wrong; I'm not a sourpuss about popular music. I just think they could write the same melody to make me jump up and down in the crowd, and similar "fine gal o' mine" lyrics with no need to bring in this "traditional material" stuff. I guess I'm not English, so I don't feel that supercharge of John Bull identity affirmation "knowing" that the tune I'm jumping up and down to has been advertised to me as some piece of my heritage.