"but not that they saw themselves as creators or originators of that material, or even as consciously altering it.
Something we don't knw, but what we do know is that singers embraced the songs as theirs - Norfolk, The West Country, Yorkshire, Irish, Scots.... no matter where they originated
The sigers identified with the songs in the way no pop fan can ever do (even if they had time to, given the mayfly-length existence of most of their songs
Examine the songs (which Roud doesn't and doesn't allow us to) and you'll find that they embrace various aspects of the communities in which they were sung
The poaching songs, for instance, appear to be a direct product of the Poaching Wars that began in 1760 and didn't finish till the outbreak of World War One
These were the direct result of the ongoing seizures of land, the most avaricious of which took place from the late eighteenth and throughout the 19th centuries
The songs dealt with the effects of no longer being able to take game to feed poor families - an insider view of the times
The same with the transportation ballads - a reflection of the opposition to mechanisation of agriculture, the attempts to set up trades unions and the rise in poverty brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
Songs of socal misalliance and parental opposition are pictures of the centuries old practice of using daughters to improve the fortunes of ambitious families by marrying them off to wealthy landowners - one of the finest examples of this is to be foung in the ballad 'Tiftie's Annie'
Harry Cox had much to say about this aspect of the songs which is why I believe he and others were disgracefully ignored in Roud's book.
I never get tired of saying that I I wanted to know the details of historical events I would go to the history books - if I wanted to know how the people at the time felt about it, I would go to the folk songs
For me, MacColl's statement, which was dismissed as dewy-eyed romanticism by Steve Gardham, says everything that needs to be said about the origins of our folk songs
"Well, there they are, the songs of our people. Some of them have been centuries in the making, some of them undoubtedly were born on the broadside presses. Some have the marvellous perfection of stones shaped by the sea's movement. Others are as brash as a cup-final crowd. They were made by professional bards and by unknown poets at the plough-stilts and the handloom. They are tender, harsh,, passionate, ironical, simple, profound.... as varied, indeed, as the landscape of this island.
We are indebted to the Harry Coxes and Phil Tanners, to Colm Keane and Maggie MacDonagh, to Belle Stewart and Jessie Murray and to all the sweet and raucous unknown singers who have helped to carry our people's songs across the centuries"
There is nothing arrogant or dogmatic in that statement - on the contrary, it embraces all possibilities and it represents the views held by most researchers down the ages.
In order to have had the insight to have written our folk songs, outsiders like the broadside hacks would have needed to possess the skills of a Dickens, or a Steinbeck, or a Melville
As it was, they were no more than bad poets working to meet a deadline.
Someone mentioned 'instinct' earlier, not a reliable definitive way to define folk song, but it has to play a major part in what we do.
I've been around the scene long enough to think I can recognise a folk song when I hear one, even though I might not have heard it before.
I think I can recognise a broadside, or a music-hall song, or a Victorian Parlour ballad.... in the same way
What is being ignored in all of this is so could the older singers, though they may not have used the same terminology
The two constants of thirty years of collecting is that the singers believed their traditional songs to be realistic - they viewed them visually as something that might have happened
The other is that they regarded them as their own, not something they had purchased at a 19th century W. H. Smith
Walter Pardon filled several tapes of these opinions - he hardly got a mention in 'Folk Songs in England' (as seen by Steve Roud)
Pity
Jim Carroll