"But you do tend to be over sensitive and defensive, over-reacting,"
'If you cut me do I not bleed?'
If I was I'd have pissed off years ago -
I hold controversial views (on this forum - I've come to realise that there are plenty like me ready to talk about the good old days when people could here folk songs at folk clubs and when they asked why there wasn't, they weren't deafened by screams of "folk fascist"
May as well get this over now
You didn't exactly call me a class traitor by having an interest beyond belting out choruses of Leaving of Liverpool' but you implied that
You haven't the slightes idea what I do our who I mix with but "you are lining up with middle class folkie snobs" just trppied off your keyboard
In fact I'be been to around 6 conferences in forty years though I've given anoyt ten talks to kids if that's class treachery (pun intended)
My best mate, Tom Munnelly (now dead ten years) was the finest collector in Europe (probably) - he was working a knitting machine in a Dublin Factory when DK Wilgus recruited him
My other Mate, MacColl, was found busking outside a Manchester cinema in the pression and went on to become an internationally know playwright and later the mos prolific songwriter on then folk scene
My main teachers were non=literate Travellers, Irish landworkers and an East Anglian village Carpenter who has read all the worlks of Hardy and Dickens when we first met him and who more about the difference between folk songs and pop songs that most academics and virtually all folkies I have ever met
You really need to sort out your inverted snobbery - one of the first things I was ever taught was that if you want to make the world a better place self-education is far more efficient than throwing a rope over a lamp-post to hang all the bosses
Tea-time
Jim