Folksongs notoriously deal very often quite explicitly with sexual themes. Examples are far too numerous to need any particulars here. But it seems to me that this 'disobliging' aspect [in Bert Lloyd's customary parlance] is frequently tempered, within the tradition, by a sort of sensitivity or delicacy lacking in many of the more explicitly gross and earthy sub-genres like those which could be subsumed under the heads of "Barrack-Room" or "Rugby" songs.

As an instance of what I mean, take the (rather charming IMO) song, "The Besom Maker" (Roud #910, I believe). If you don't know it, you may find it on my YouTube channel.

The eponymous first-person narrator follows the respectable trade of the title, but appears nevertheless to accept money from the young men to whom she is promiscuously wont to grant her favours upon meeting them in the course of her work ("I eased him of his chink" or "I eased him of his jingalo"); combining her legitimate trade with part-time opportunistic prostitution, in fact.

Yet, when the inevitable consequences catch up with her --
(rather less readily than in so many such folksong encounters, in which pregnancy seems to result from any encounter, the obligingness of most folk maidens being matched only by their astounding fertility!)
-- and "a lovely sweet young baby soon on me did smile", she unhesitatingly gives up her old lifestyle and employment and cheerfully and responsibly embraces her new situation —

"I'll bundle up my besoms
Take them to the fair
Sell them off by wholesale
For nursing's now my care"

-- understatedly exemplary conduct indeed — of the sort of unexpected and somewhat oxymoronic "innocence", which it is my purpose here to suggest is so often typical of the Folk's attitude to amatory matters.

No sniggering. No obscenity. Just a healthy and matter-of-fact acceptance of the realities of existence.

I love it.

≈Michael≈