He was a mill worker
The point I was trying to make was that most of them had their roots in the communities they wrote about and a great number of them did not romanticise those communities or patronise them with pastiche
The fact that some of their compositions appeared on broadsides was incidental - the broadside trade was a predatory one that took its songs from wherever they appeared
Many, in my opinion, remade them to sell to urban customers and in doing so took the reality from them
It's interesting to compare this practice with the 'ballad-selling trade' in Ireland, wheer the songs were taken directly from the mouths of the singers, printed and sold as heard
Jim