"What is the evidence that any named folks songs "
What evidence is there that they didn't?
Evidence not backward extrapolation please

Enough of this anonymous waterboarding
I have made my position quite clear
I firmly believe that the folk were capable having made their folk songs - nobody here has ever suggested that they couldn't have
I belive that to have been the opinions of researchers and anthologists since the beginnings of folk song research until a bunch of new kids on the block came along, redifined folk songs as "anything the folk sang" and claimed otherwise
It is logical to me that sailors songs fairly accurately describing life at sea and on shore might well have been made by the people the songs were about
The same with soldiers, and farmworkers and miners and rural dwellers and navvies.....
I believe that on the basis of talking to traditional singers who accepted the "truth" (authenticity) of the songs they sang
I also believe that if Irish rural dwellers in similar situations ot their English counterparts made the me=any hundreds of songs describing their lives, why not the English - a cultural deficiency maybe?
THese were not Dibdin's "jolly Jack Tar' pastiches or Marie Antoinette's Versailles tableau Shepherds and Shepherdesses - they were realistically described people in realistically described situations using genuine-sounding vernacular language and an apparent knowledge of country and trade practices and lore.
It has always been the down-to-earth universal reality that has impressed me about our folk-songs
Now - instead of these fingernail-extracting interrogations, why not tell me why these songs should be the products of desk-bound city hacks who were notorious for their bad poetry?
These discussions are not being turned into "arguments" - that would involve two sets of ideas - not one sid offering only one-sided stonewalling
Your turn now, I think - that's an offer to anybody here, by the way
Jim Carroll