"it is not your value judgements"
Not "value judgements" Vic, and certainly not mine, but whether the songs are singable or not - that is everything
Their chalk and cheese comparison to our folk songs says everything that needs to be said as far as I am concerned
The overwhelming majority of broadside songs are unsingable - pore through the selected collections of (presumably) the most representative of them and see what I mean.
For the hacks to have written them implies a 'school of writers' attempting to write in a certain way - a geographical impossibility

Sorry Vic - you (and everybody here) is ignoring the uniqueness of fok songs and ignoring Bert's closing question - what are we going to call this bunch of unique songs - or maybe they are not unique
Would you like to be the first to say they are not?

"Some known poets turned their hands to broadsides on occasion."
90 plus percent of them? - I don't think so
Jim