"No-one on any thread or in any book in recent years has suggested working people are incapable of making their own songs"
This is exactly what you have done here in regard to folk songs - the only example we have ever had of "a voice of the people"
You claim that that "voice" rather than being the voice of the people, is that of poor poets doing it for money.
If that is true, working people have left no record behind them of their lives, experiences and aspirations
You even denigrated the oral tradition by comparing it to the work of "the lowest of the broadside hacks in an attept to explain a poor version of "Higher Germany"
"Its poor construction and inconsistency might suggest having come from oral tradition, but it could also be down to the fact that such jobs were given to the lowest apprentices in the printers at the bottom of the market. It's not possible to say whether it precedes or derives from 'High Germany'"
Your claim has wavered fro 90% to 100% of our folk songs being commercially produced products.
Your responses to being challenged have been at best inconsistent and evasive, right through to being personally insulting as now, where you are all but calling me a liar
"This is typical of JC's twisting and turning and misquoting or, if I am overgenerous, simply perhaps misunderstanding."
I have set my case out as clearly as I can, I am not politically motivated as you have suggested, I am not an attention seeker, as you have suggested, nor am I a liar as you have also suggested
I have insulted no-one here, though you suggest I have
I have doubts of your abilities as a researcher, based on what you have come up with and the inconsistencies you use to defend it, but your aggressive and insulting behaviour makes you everything you have accused me of being
It's about time you addressed the points I am making instead of hurling childish abuse
I certainly have no intentions of being bullied and blustered out of expressing my opinions on this matter
Jim Carroll