Burl,

The reference to "One of the Has-Beens" is made in an article Dave Arthur published recently in the EFDSS magazine Root & Branch. You probably haven't heard it because it was one of the Australian songs Lloyd collected in the late 1920s/early 30s. According to Dave A, Lloyd's private notes said that the song came from a vaudeville actor. When he published the song, he claimed in the published work that it was from a teamster; Dave suggests this is because a teamster would have been considered a more authentic source.

The Recruited Collier was one of the songs Lloyd published in Come All ye Bold Miners, and it's pretty common now in the revival (Kate Rusby has recorded it twice, for example). It's pretty clear that Bert created it with reference to an original by Robert Anderson, but he claimed to have it from a collier named Jim Huxtable. The original song was not about a colier at all, but a ploughman; Bert made the changes in order to produce an example of "industrial folk song," an idea to which he was both attracted and ideologically commited in the 50s. This argument was first made by Roy Palmer in the book Singer, Song and Scholar edited by Ian Russell. I have since found additional support for Palmer's theory.

I'm currently working on my own article about another of Lloyd's creations, which he claimed to have collected from Tom Cook of Eastbridge. It's a rather involved argument, so i won't get into it too deeply here...