There is also Spencer Moore's transatlantic rendering of the Irish ballad, The Girl I Left Behind . And there is black Sid Hemphill fiddling away like one of his white confreres. But it goes much deeper than that. Throughout Lomax's career he has spearheaded a Rousseauesque tendency which sees folksong as an agent of socio-political development. Change the songs a people sing, the message seems to go, and you change the feeling in their hearts.
Logic decrees that it is the other way round.
Song follows in the wake of change, it does not promote it. European culture is inherently intolerant of that which it finds to be different. We treat other cultures, other races, other musics, as both deviant from, and inferior to, our own. These songs do not need to be read as such. They are emotional statements, expressions of the human feeling within each and every one of us.