" These are Jim's descriptions and no-one else's."
Will yopu please stop doing this Steve; all writing on the broadside trade indicates that we know little about the broadside writers, which is largely what makes your claims so ludicrous
You have said this, Roud sys this, Shepherd says this, there is next to no information on the writers in Hindleys Catnach biography, or Shepherd's wor on Pitts
To state that "the broadside poets came from a wide variety of backgrounds" is invented nonsense and you know it - I've challenged you to provide proof before and you have failed to do so.
"Let him give us an English example of a song in the corpus that couldn't have been written by an urban writer."
I believe that rather quibble about individual songs and get bogged down as we did once before, it is far more profitable to place your shoddy broadside compositions next to say Banks of Sweet Primroses, or Maid of Australia, or even the few verses of Brigg Fair Grainger collected - or any of our classic folk songs and see how they compare in style and language.
You have alrweady made this difficult by claiming that up to 100% of them originated on the broadside presses (we have yet to receive an acknowledgement that you did claim that figure)
The idea that they were desk-bound is not ludicrous - you have already accepted this by suggesting they researched working practices and equipment and scanned newspapers for information for their compositions
The picture you have painted is of a full-time professional working for money
Vic rightly offered their working under intense pressure as an excuse for their bad poetry.
The picture Roud paints is that of a professional writer working under conveyor-belt like conditions.
If we wish to work out who wrote our folk songs, these are the last people you would go to as possibles.
I repeat and will continue to do so) - once you accept the idea that working people were able to write songs you have to accept that they probably wrote our folk songs
If you don't believe them capable, you need to say so so we know where they stand - time to put your cards on the table
You introduced politics into this discussion Steve - your attempt to dismiss working people as creators of anything, including folk tales, lore, dance, and music and present them as repeating parrots smacks of a political agends to me
Jim Carroll