"what was happening in Ireland and it is ridiculous to make such a suggestion!!!!"
You couldn't possibly deny what has hppened in Ireland if you wanted to - in the field of collecting, Tom Munnelly's work ranks internationally
There has been a concentrated effort to exclude what has happened in Ireland to arriving at an intelligent understanding of how the singing tradition worked, claiming it to be somehow "different" - your own argument.
It most certainly was not and it provides us with the most recent picture (apart from the Travelling communities) of a living oral English-language tradition.
We are never gong to know for sure who made our songs but any reasonable assessment of what might have happened will have to be made by taking everything we have to hand otherwise 'made for profit by bad poets' re-defining crowd will have been given a free hand
I'm not prepared to let that happen
There have always been people around who have advocated that working people were not able or not willing to give voice to their experiences - folk song has been the stumbling block to this claim up to now
Now the knockers are queueing up to leap on the idea
Jim Carroll