"is a broadside commonplace. "
It's also an old saying - used in my urban family
"At last we have JC's examples of the prime of English folksong that couldn't possibly have been written by a broadside writer"
No you haven't Steve - I said I was not going into the single songs cul-de-sac and that is what I meant
The ones I mentioned are, as far as I am concerned, typical of th best songs in the English Tradition and well within the grasp of any country songmaker, no more than that
Tell you what - you want to play that game - tell me which of our folk songs is beyond the abilities of a rural song-maker
If you can name none, you make my point for me that there is an at least equal chance that they were made by country people
"Rigby hits the nail firmly on the head when he writes:-
"How many rural folk songs are there that deal directly with poverty or class divisions, "
Im' interested that you should pick this up, yet choose to ignore my response Vic
AS Richard pointed out, that there may well have been overt political songs in the repertoire that were not collected or even sung to a collector, but that's beside the point.
The social content of our repertoire lies in how they deal with the effects of political and social events rather than the events themselves
What astounds and somewhat depresses me in all this is the readiness show by people here to accept that rural working people didn't make their songs but bought them as they would today's pop albums
Nobody appears even to want to discuss the implications of this - it means that working people were no more than repeating the work of bad poets
Steve Gardham chose to bring my politics into this, yet it is his arguments which largely remove the likelihood of a creative rural working class, and there seems to be a consensus her that this was the case, though so far, nobody has actually had the bottle to put that into words.
I have come to the conclusion of the time Steve and I have gone head to head that there ois a political agenda her - a non-creative working class, the denigration or the oral tradition by comparing it to the work of "the lowest apprentices in the printers at the bottom of the market", the idea that "the vast majority of the rural population in the early 19th century lived in abject conditions one step above slavery and there are multiple reasons why they would not have had the inclination to make their own songs"
Steve, in his talk, paid lip service to there being a "two way process" between people's songmaking and the broadside presses, yet his %94 to %100 having originated from the hacks doesn't leave a great deal of a likelihood that worker made any songs
As I said - how depressing
Jim Carroll