its your insistence that a load of authorities on folk music back the days when talking shit was the prerogative of every upper class know all knows more about folk music than we do.

thats what pisses everybody off.

allright you have have put your trust in a slew of middle class bores,

my fifty years gigging in almost exclusively working class venues tells me that your authorities have misled you somwhat.

Bunyan re-writing our Captain cried all hands didn't stop it from being folk music. folk used it. for their funerals; weddings; to sing in the back of buses. as an expression of joy and hope.

i'm sorry you don't get it. but folk music is ours. not a gang of gypsies in the arse end of nowhere. not the english ping pong and prance lot. not ewan maccoll's.

ours! the peoples ! publishers have no jurisdiction over five year old kids in the schoolyard, sportsmen after a match, singers in the top room of a folk club, singers with a pissed up audience half hour before slinging out time, carousers round the campfire. in all these situations the prs and the folk song collectors are still at home sipping sherry and talking bollocks to thosE who are daft enough to believe them.

WE OWN THE MUSIC!!!