"Some wanted folk song to be an expression of class anger on behalf of the working classes."
Nobody I met ever wanted it to be that
Some people used it to express their own political beliefs, notably CND and The American Civil rights movement, but that's not claiming that the songs expressed political anger - the latter were largely using spirituals
"Some wanted folk song (and folklore more generally) to be all about the supernatural, or about survivals from pre-Christian religion."
That was a very early approach that largely disappeared with Wimberly's more or less definitive work
"English music to counter the dominance of German music."
That was Sharp's original aim, similar approaches were taken by Bartok and Kodaly in Europe
In each case, the collectors and researchers came to the idea that Folk Music could stand on its own two feet as an art form in itself
Sharp's 'Some Conclusions' for all its faults, was an attempt to understand folk musc for what it meant to the folk,
Don't know enough about Church music to comment
"Jim seems to want folk song to represent a body of music composed by non-literate, anonymous members of the communities in which it was sung."
Not me Rigby - that is what the bulk of scholarship accepted as early as William Motherwell when he wrote'Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern" in 1846
Please don't make this "my" theory - it has been the long accepted belief up to comparatively recently
Watever the truth, all these 'generalisations' have a validity of one degree and another - that is why the statement by MacColl that started this shouting match is so important
"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. "
There's nothing dogmatic about that - rightly raises the possibility that our folk songs came from several sources - it was that that suggestion that elicited Steve's accusation of naivety - everything went downhill from then on
Jim Carroll