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Dave, Thaks for the review. Many might pass on it, but it is the kind of thing i think we need more of on the forum -- more diversity! A point: English "folk song" is bedevilled by problems of `authenticity' and `genuineness', problems that many of us face when engaging in representation strategies ourselves. For example, so many of the folk songs I learned at my mum's knee -- "Strawberry Faire", "Horsy, horsy, don't you stop", "whilsting Gypsy", "Four-loom weaver", "Ilkley Moor Bar T'at" "Barbra Allen", etc -- are called `broadsheet ballads' in the ethnomusicologist literature. Turns out they were written by an (often) Lancashire-based Tin-Pan Alley- type industry during the early part of the industrial revolution for commercial sale to newly-migrated industrial workers, printed on broadsheet newsprint. Many poor working-class families used the broadsheets to paper their walls, line cupboards etc. The format was to use an older melody (not necessarily *ancient*), but rather a popular one from a short while ago, around which to frame new topical lyrics -- thus "Four-loom weaver". These songsmiths pitched their songs to a recently ex-agricultural workforce faced with the very different circumstances of industrial towns and labour. It is these songs and their immediate precursors which have lasted as Childe Ballads, etc. Songs which spoke to working people but which were produced for their consumption by a cultural industry looking for profit. If you like, they were the pop songs of their day. Much of the musicology community (at least the parts of it I encountered in my musicology courses) seems to retain a romantic notion of "the folk" without ever engaging with whom that folk were or where or when they come from. Thus the issue of representativeness receeds even as one reaches out to grasp it. I think (and this applies to both Woody Guthrie and Billy Bragg) what matters is whether the songs touch the people who listen to them now -- stir their imaginations; allow them to place themselves within the narrative; and tell complex stories effectively within the constraints of style and economy. This `universality' is part of the reason for their `staying power'. For example, I grew up in Vancouver, yet some of Guthrie's dust-bowl ballads touched me deeply even though I had never seen a prairie or worked a farm. Authentic? I can't say. But moving? Yes. And my universe is richer for it. thanks once again for the review. cheers rhys Rhys Evans School For Policy Studies University of Bristol Rodney Lodge, Grange Rd., Clifton, Bristol BS8 4EA %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%