Jack: I am sorry you seem to have missed the context for my comments on Lloyd. It has been alleged that Lloyd never did anything political. It seems plain to me that this is incorrect, and I quoted Gammon in part to back up my view that he was political and did political things.

I do not think that at any point in my post do I dismiss Marxist thinking, by the way. Nor do I claim that Lloyd sought to conceal his own Marxism.

I have read enough about the 'tinkering' that Lloyd did to come to a view that he is not entirely reliable as an authority. Some of this may have been politically motivated, some mainly due to his own tendency to 'improve' the material he had. One thing he says in his book on folk song is that literacy can be an advantage and lead to better songs, and I sometimes wonder whether he came to this view on the basis of his own 'improvements'.

This leads in to my other point that I disagree that 'research' into folk song is some sort of cumulative enterprise, a more and more business so that if one rejects or critiques or contextualises the works of the past one is somehow subtracting from the accrued total.