"Like Robert Tannahill? "
Tanahill wasn't a broadside writer - he was a weaver-poet, as was Bamnford, Axon, Lackock and all the others mentioned previously as examples of working men producing poems of working life based on their own experiences
He was not Urban, but came from the market town of Paisley, the population of which in the first couple of decades of the 19th century, was less than 5,000
There is no comparison between Tannahill and the metropolitan based hacks we are discussion - he was, in essence, a country poet
Jim Carroll