"He then says that the question about whether 'ordinary people' had poetic ability has nothing to do with this discussion."
No I did not - it has everything to do with argument - where the hell do you get this stuff ?
It has been my point from the beginning that Working People have always made songs to express their feelings
I spent six months in Manchester Central Library once wading my way though the song columns that regularly featured in the old Chartist and other campaigning newspapers - many of them made by textile workers
I mentioned the paper on workwer poets because it reinforces my point

My argument regarding who mde our folk songs has always been that once you accept that workers were capable of making songs, you have to accept that they almost certainly made our folk songs - why should they pay anybody to express their feelings ?

'Peasant', as technically innacurate as it was, was a fairly common way of describing rural working people - certainly not exclusive to Sharp
The fact that Harker took these people out of context as often as he did is what makes Harker's book wildly unreliable - it lays all the sins of post Victorian at the door of a group of people who respected 'the lower classes' enough to roll up their sleeves and labouriously collect examples of their culture, sometimes in extremely difficult circumstances
They deserve mor than snideswipes and accusations of 'fakery' for having done that
Jim Carroll